“I don’t know what the Houston Chronicle used to be like but clearly the editorial board is turning left.”
It seems to me that most newspapers are farther left than they used to be. Twenty or thirty years ago, even the San Francisco Chronicle had a token conservative columnist and ran syndicated stuff from the likes of Pat Buchanan. Now, the paper is 100% liberal advocacy, basically where Mother Jones was in the ‘80s.
Why the shift? I think partly generational change among editorial staff. There was an old guard of newspaper people, though left-leaning, that basically supported the idea of being even-handed and presenting multiple viewpoints. That generation was replaced by, let’s call it an “Obama generation,” that has dispensed with any sort of facade of objectivity. I think another factor is declining readership. As younger people turn to the internet, and conservatives balk at liberal rags, there’s a vicious cycle in which newspaper readership continually dwindles down to elderly white liberals.