July 12, 2007
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch...
One of the maddening, infuriating things about contemporary life is that in most ways this country is majority conservative, and leaning towards majority Republican. And yet liberals sit smugly in many legacy enclaves and act as if their ideas were not only the majority view, but the only sensible and "normal" and "modern" view---so much so that they need never engage in principled debate. (Which they would lose.)
I live in one of those enclaves, which adds to my ire. And another enclave is the "mainstream media," (MSM) which is almost entirely liberal and Democrat, and usually covers conservative or "Red State" or Christian matters like anthropologists visiting the Cannibal Isles. (The emblem of this was the decision at the NYT a couple of years ago to assign a reporter—one reporter—to cover all conservative matters. He was of course a liberal.)
The New York Times is the central spider of the MSM, in a very literal way, since all the local papers and TV news stations key off of the NYT, which gets to frame the stories and often decides what is "news" and what is not. When you watch the TV news (except perhaps Fox) you might imagine that all those glossy people study what is happening in the world and decide what is important. Nuh uh. Mostly the decisions are made by the NYT, and the WaPo and the AP. And none of them will never DEBATE, they just take it as read that they are at the the center of opinion, and have the intrinsic right to decide what we will know.
So it is with the utmost pleasure and pure delight that I read in Michelle Malkin that the NYT's credit rating has been lowered—yet again—and is barely above the level of junk bonds!!! It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of pompous frauds. Go boys, lead your whole vile treasonous industry down into the bone yard!
S&P Lowers New York Times Ratings To BBB/A-3; Off Watch 2007-07-11 12:18 (New York)
Rationale
On July 11, 2007, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services lowered its long-term corporate credit and senior unsecured debt ratings on The New York Times Co., to ‘BBB’ from ‘BBB+’. The short-term corporate credit and commercial paper ratings on the company were also lowered, to ‘A-3′ from ‘A-2′. All ratings were removed from CreditWatch, where they were placed with negative implications on March 23, 2007, following the company’s announced plan to increase its dividend to shareholders. The rating outlook is negative....
Among the many reasons the NYT gang deserves to suffer is that the NYT is a business. With shareholders. The editors of the NYT have decided that their ideology is more important than anything else, including profits, and is worth excluding at least 60% of the population from their potential readership. But they don't OWN the paper! They have a duty, a responsibility to the owners to try to make a profit. They are in effect stealing from their shareholders.
Posted by John Weidner at July 12, 2007 08:08 AMWhy is the newspaper business going off the rails?
Perhaps because they've spent the last several decades asking reporters to write down to an eight-grade educational level, a standard that has invariably been dropping.
Perhaps because the reporters then take it as read that their readers are actually stupid, and start condescending to them.
Perhaps because newspapers treat anyone who is not coastal (or with their views) as something out of the nineteenth century, and condescend to them as well.
Perhaps because they don't report, they repeat.
You know, Denver had an alternative weekly that was, as most of them are, on the leftward, liberal side of things. I loved that paper because the reporters got out and damned well did their research for the stories they put out. I moved back to Sacramento and picked up the News & Review once. Not only was it propaganda-style party-line, it was boring. Hardly an original or interesting thought to be seen.
The New York Times used to be the paper of record despite its slant because it had interesting, original, well-researched journalism. Now it's a joke because it's gone party-line groupthink. The quality has suffered and it's a shame.
Posted by: B. Durbin at July 12, 2007 01:17 PM
