The media is never able to “get it”

As everyone knows, these are not the best of times. This is especially so for the mainstream print media that is witnessing a constant decline in revenues and circulation. Much of this decline is separate and apart from the current economic woes that the media, in lockstep with their left wing political masters, loves to call the worst economy since the Great Depression. In the past few weeks, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News and the Christian Science Monitor have folded their print publications. More mainstream publications will follow suit and there is even speculation that the venerable New York Times will go under in the not too distant future.

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The economy is playing a part in the decline of newspapers but the full fall from their once exalted position can be put neither on the state of economy nor on the arrival of the Internet. There may be a time in the future when children will grow up to be well informed adults without ever having picked up a newspaper but that day is not yet here. Many of us who have grown up in the pre-Internet world enjoy reading a hardcopy of a newspaper much the same as others enjoy watching the news on television. A further reason for the decline of modern day newspapers is their content and the inability of the media to acknowledge any defects in their product. The elites in the media industry simply have the inability to relate to or understand their readers.           An example of this elitism is perfectly illustrated in a recent column by Michael Den Tandt that appeared in the Toronto Sun. Den Tandt has a perfect and simple solution to the decline in newspaper circulation; people should go out and buy more of them, presumably whether they want to read them or not. As for elitism, Den Tandt illustrates this trait in his lead.           Here’s the solution to the newspaper crisis; Buy some. Stop griping quite so much about changes to the comics, or crossword or the bridge column (although it is your everlasting right to do so), and take out a subscription. Then pat yourself on the back: You’ve done democracy a good turn.           In discussing this lead, it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps a good place would be Den Tandt’s notion that a hardcopy newspaper is necessary in order for democracy to flourish. What absolute garbage. If people are forgoing newspapers to read news on the Internet where there is access to a seemingly unlimited amount of sources and publications, how can this somehow be putting democracy in peril? It can’t but it makes people like Den Tandt feel important.           As Rush Limbaugh has said on many occasions the media is the only business where the customer is always wrong. And if he or she is not wrong, they are stupid. Den Tandt’s contempt for newspaper readers oozes from the first paragraph of his column. If people are forgoing buying or subscribing to newspapers it must be because they don’t like (a) the comics; (b) the crossword or (c) the bridge column. It never occurs to him that people are fed up with the bias, with the blurring of opinion and hard news and with newspaper reporters pushing their own agenda. We, the readers, are apparently not able to make these judgments; we’re only prepared to ditch a particular paper if the bridge column isn’t up to snuff.           The arrogance of Michael Den Tandt; telling people to buy newspapers for the sake of buying them and telling the unwashed masses not to be so upset about the comics or the crosswords is perhaps the best illustration of why the mainstream print media is going down. And going down fast.

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