In any other well-run business, management would seek to find out why they were in a decline and move heaven and earth to fix the problem. Why is it that the LA and NY papers, as well as some of those in flyover country don’t get it? We, the people do not want biased news. We the people want just the facts. We the people do not want to hear the opinion of a twenty-something, marxist-educated, so-called journalist presented as straight news. May they broil in their own juices and seek to live on food stamps.
People positively lust to know what is going on. That's why Adam ate the apple, and why Ulysses went crazy when he heard the Sirens' song. Is it any wonder that people have been making a buck selling information ever since? Now, with the Internet (made possible by the dirt-cheap communications bandwidth of fiber optics and lasers as satellites), all of a sudden (in historical terms) people can communicate so freely on a global scale that the business model not only of dead-tree journalism but even of radio/TV journalism are shaken. Because people want to be heard, just as much as they want to hear. And because the business of journalism was always to sell the "sizzle" of knowledge but deliver only titillation ("'Man bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man'") and irritation ("If it bleeds, it leads), leaving the thirst for knowledge and understanding unassuaged.It's hard for us, who have lived with the "magic" of electronic communication all our lives, and whose grandparent lived with it all of their lives, to grasp what it was like to not be able to learn of events until days and weeks after the fact. The commercial transmission of news via telegraph had a huge cultural impact. This was the opportunity which the Associated Press exploited to create a monopoly of news, and the concomitant cult of the "objective" journalist. The cult of the objective journalist is a central feature of monopoly news, so the associated press (not merely the Associated Press, but any journalists anywhere who are willing to go along and get along with the AP) cooperates in promoting it. The cult of the objective journalist is incompatible with the idea of the equality of the people; it is a hierarchy which is maintained by propaganda "pecking" just as surely as the hierarchy of the barnyard is enforced by the dominant chickens pecking the less dominant ones.
Perhaps in that context it is understandable that the culture of the news business does not permit it to adapt to the distributed and interactive Internet model of journalism exemplified by Free Republic.