On Bloggers and Newspapers

This morning I was listening to the Michael Smerconish show on local radio. He's a George H.W. Bush Republican who is not much of a conservative although he's the always the guy "on the right" on MSNBC whenever they do one of those inane side-by-side screenshot deals.

Anyway, Smerconish said for the second time in two shows that he's bummed about the state of the newspaper business and is worried because if they go, what will take their place? He also railed against bloggers again and is one of these who has to throw in the obligatory "guy writing on his couch in his pajamas" types. For the record, he also writes for the Philly Inquirer and Daily News and they are in bankruptcy as we speak. His latest on this topic can be found here.

Perhaps Mr. Smerconish needs an education about just how blogs work. Perhaps he's not been enlightened to the fact that newspapers and blogs help each other to survive. A good link from Matt Drudge could bring a paper somewhere between 500,000 and a million unique hits (and newspapers beg him for those links). That is potentially a million folks who would not have gone to that papers' website. The same goes for Glenn Reynolds who is more of a pure blogger. A link from him could result in 30,000 uniques in a day. In the online world, links mean revenue and newspapers are never going to survive without a robust web presence. So a guy "sitting on his couch" is directly benefiting the health of the news paper industry.

Smerconish lamented that without the daily paper, we'd not have had Watergate exposed, the NSA wiretapping investigation or myriad other scandals. And therein lies the problem. Note they were both against the GOP and most in-depth pieces in the papers are. Bias is why we saw a rapid decline in newspaper circulation.

Let me take you back to 2004 when Smerconish's current employer--the Philadelphia Inquirer--ran a 21-day endorsement for John Kerry. 21-days of explaining why Kerry was far superior to George W. Bush was met with raised eyebrows by even the most liberal of journalists. It was pure and simple propaganda by the Inqy and it laid open the bias of the media in grand fashion.

Fast-forward to 2008 and you'll see example number two of why newspapers are dying. The Rev. Wright scandal, William Ayers and Bernadine Dornh's terrorist past, the inner workings of Chicago politics and Obama's scars from it, The shady housing deal with Tony Rezko and the list goes on and on. The main job of the press is to keep politicians in check and they failed miserably this time even more than in the past. They became cheerleaders and dropped any pretense of fair play and non-partisanship. One day they printed a story in the NY Times intimating that John McCain was having an affair and the next the WaPo drooled over Obama's pecs. One day the Times slammed Cindy McCain and the next they fawned over Michelle Obama's intellect. In other words, they shamed every previous journalist worth his salt. I won't even go into how they smeared Sarah Palin repeatedly and daily, whcih may have been the most disturbing media action of the entire election.

There was a time when every politician was fair game and now it's only the ones with an "R" after their name. If the media had done their job and properly vetted Obama, I'd strongly suspect we'd have Hillary Clinton in the White house right now. If they had written of Father Pfleger or the fact that Obama's half-brother is living in a hovel in Kenya on less than a buck a day, it would have had an effect. No one would have known of any of this had it not been for blogs and conservative websites.

One thing Smerconish doesn't get is the fact that not one serious blogger, be they huge like LGF or Glenn Reynolds or small like me want to see newspapers gone. We rely on them and have an interesting symbiotic relationship with them in this brave, new, Internet world. Smerconish has become an elitist because he thinks only "journalists" can break news. Maybe he ought to read Pajama's Media on occasion and see just how good writing can be by "people sitting on their couch." Hell, the way Maureen Dowd mails it in every week, one suspects she's writing while sitting in her basement on a pullout couch but I digress. For the record, again, I subscribe to the Inquirer and have for a decade, I like the feel of the paper and the portability but have to say the bias turns me off.

One last thing, Ed links to this former conservative and current Obama groupie Kathleen Parker who writes:

The biggest challenge facing America’s struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry.

Yes, Dittoheads, you heard it right.

Drive-by pundits, to spin off of Rush Limbaugh’s “drive-by media,” are non-journalists who have been demonizing the media for the past 20 years or so and who blame the current news crisis on bias.

Parker gets it exactly wrong and like Smerconish sounds elitist. Was Thomas Paine a "trained" journalist? Did Ben Franklin go to Columbia or Syracuse and learn how to be a journalist? This country was built on a free press and the free exchange of ideas. people get their news in different ways now and Parker is upset that her conduit is taking a financial beating. She has to blame someone and lashes out at at "untrained" journalist's for the train wreck daily publication has become. I tend to think it's more a case of the industry employing people like Ms. Parker who have a desperately hard time changing with the times and fearing that the future is here and their place in it is not as secure as it once was.

To sum up this considerable rant, I don't want to see the local fishwrap go the way of the VCR. I want a vibrant, unbiased print media where every politician should fear for his seat. I want a media that will not blame the mortgage meltdown solely on industry but also on the Chris Dodd's and Barney Franks of the world who made the laws that allowed this to happen. I want to pick up the Inquirer and read a piece by Ed Rendell one day, Bill Kristol the next and Michael Smerconish the next. I want to read about every scandal written with the exact same gusto--the Dodd scandal investigated with the same zeal as the Abramoff scandal.

People like Mr. Smerconish and Ms. Parker can't see the writing on the wall but one would suspect when all is said and done, the death of the media will be traced to 2008 when they assisted getting Obama elected but more so that the only real journalist's we have left work for the National Enquirer and broke the John Edwards story while the rest of the media covered for him.