From this Morning’s Times:
“The news business is something worse than horrible. If that’s the future, we don’t have much of a future,” Sam Zell, who bought the Tribune Company last year, said recently in The Baltimore Sun.
The Tribune Company, and therefore Sam Zell, owns the Hartford Courant.
Years ago I heard a story about the company that made Gravy Train dog food. Spurred on by the bean counters, it continually cheapened the formula in its gravy making dog food. Sales began to plummet. At first they couldn’t figure out why. Then they found out: the cheaper formula no longer made gravy. I heard this story years ago, and can’t vouch for it 100%, but it has the ring of truthiness.
Which brings us to Mr. Zell’s Hartford Courant. Today’s front page features the following:
1. Top Story: First born children get more attention from their parents.
2. There’s a woman in Connecticut who does animal autopsies.
3. People in the tiny upscale suburb of Colebrook help each other.
4. Look inside for a story about Personal Digital Keyboards if you want to play the piano.
5. There’s an antique mall in New Haven, look inside.
Also on the front page, besides the above “articles”:
6. A “link” (sorry, I can’t think of the correct term) to the sports pages, re: the UConn women.
7. A “link” to a story about “Bunnytown”, a “Kid’s Show for Grownups”.
8. A “link” to a story on page A3 about the 4,000th American casualty in Iraq.
Maybe the reason newspapers are having such a hard time is that they’re not making gravy anymore, or not much of it, judging by the above. No doubt Mr. Zell would tell us that he’s giving the people what they want, but the fact remains that the decline in newspaper readership corresponds in time to the de-newsification of the average newspaper.
Sidebar: Also in this morning’s Times, we are told that the media is paying less attention to the Iraq War, which is blamed on the fact that the public is losing interest. There’s a chicken and egg problem there, but that seems to be mostly ignored in the article.
To every cloud there is a silver lining, of course. I was struck by this:
“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”
It would be nice if we could conclude that the media has stopped calling Michael O’Hanlon because he was wrong about Iraq at the start and has been consistently wrong all along, but that is too much to hope for. In this country, being consistently wrong is a mark of distinction. Why, even Hillary wants to put Alan Greenspan in charge of fixing the mess he helped create.
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