« David Korn Needs Some Perspective | Main | USAID Accomplishments In Iraq »
May 04, 2005
Newspapers' Declining Readership: Does Profit Motive Trump Bias?
The WSJ yesterday reported on the continuing decline of newspaper readership:
Daily U.S. newspaper circulation took its biggest tumble in nearly a decade, falling 1.9% in the six-month period ended March 31, according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
The guys at Powerline have more on this.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the still-entrenched bias of the mainstream media, and I've come to the conclusion that the MSM can actually be a very handy cudgel when dealing with spit-flecked rantings such as this (thanks to Decision '08) or more sophisticated leftist attacks such as this.
My quasi-macro argument goes like this: The precipitous decline of newspaper readership (and thus advertising revenue, and thus profits), combined with the unabashed animus most of the MSM holds for GWB in particular and conservatives in general, almost guarantees massive coverage of any anti-conservative story (see Abu Ghraib, for example).
Now consider typical leftist urban myths such as "we're in Iraq for the oil" or "US bombing killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians", and think of...Carl Bernstein. Or Bob Woodward. Or the Washington Post. They all won Pulitzer prizes for their reporting of the Watergate scandal, and their reputations as gods of journalism were established for life.
What hungry young journalist doesn't want to be the next Woodward or Bernstein? Which of these newspapers, with their sinking readership figures, doesn't dream of breaking a story like Watergate? If coalition bombing had actually killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians, don't you think our vaunted paper of record would have given the story the Abu Ghraib treatment, times ten? If the loony-left conspiracy theories were true, they'd be all over the front pages of all the New York Times.
But they aren't true...and instead the Times treats us to wishful thinking writ large, like the al Qaqaa fable.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thebernoullieffect.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/130
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Newspapers' Declining Readership: Does Profit Motive Trump Bias?:
» Are Newspapers Going the Way of the Dinosaurs? from Decision '08
It's entirely possible, depending on your conception of newspaper. There will always be a place for the local paper, with stories about weddings and community events, but to put out a paper like the New York Times or the Washington Post is a tremendo... [Read More]
Tracked on May 4, 2005 01:00 PM
Comments
Perhaps they are correcting their circulation numbers after the recent scandals at other papers.
Posted by: JClancy at May 4, 2005 05:08 AM
That certainly could be part of it; that's John Hinderaker's opinion, too, over at Powerline. But I think there are a lot of other forces at work, left-leaning bias being only one of them.
I think my point still holds, though, regardless of the reasons for the decline: if any media outlet really had any of the big stories the Democratic Underground types are constantly throwing around, they'd run it in a microsecond.
Posted by: Jeff at May 4, 2005 11:30 AM
