>>>David Carr seems to get it...somewhat.
How did this slip through?<<<
I’m a former newspaperman. In fact, I worked in Wasilla when Sarah Palin was on the city council. I quit in disgust because of the unrelenting leftist politics... but that’s another post. Here’s my response to the idea that David Carr gets it.
Newspapers are, at their core, businesses. They need readers to stay alive. For the past 15 years, the print media has been dying of anemia as readers slowly drain away and move to other sources of news. The Times is a husk of what it used to be when I read it religiously back in the early 1970s, and they know it, and many publishers, editors, and reporters already know that the reason readers are leaving stems from the notion of “advocacy journalism,” which almost always means “leftwing advocacy.”
Since most of us aren’t leftists, readers get bored, disinterested, disgusted, or supremely pissed off. They’re looking at Limbaugh and O’Reilly and Drudge and wondering how they can do it, too.
Eventually, they will either adapt or die. Many will be unwilling to give up their leftist beliefs, and those papers will go the way of poetry readings and the village crier. Some will gain of glimmer of understanding and start opening their newsrooms to journalists who reflect their readers.
My frank assessment of the Times is it is too late to provide the token conservative viewpoint and hope for increased readership. Too many readers have been burned too many times. Palin, though, for the left, must feel like being dragged through the gauntlet.
This moment in our nation’s history feels to me like the watershed moment when the left is finally going to pop like the empty balloon it is. The popping noise will probably sound more like a fart, though. Stink bad, too. LOL