Evena stopped clock Debra Saunders is right once in a while:
The industry’s problems, of course, lend credibility to the views of people who gleefully root for newspapers to fail. I’ve met smart people who vote who happily announce that they are too busy to read a newspaper. The problem is, they don’t know what they don’t know.
Some believe that if newspapers go under, then the Internet will provide.
In the case of conservatives, they often don’t notice that those right-leaning sites, which they visit daily, provide them with fodder by linking to stories reported and written by newspaper reporters. While they are trashing newspapers, they’re reading newspaper stories and citing them to bolster their arguments. They may not notice if, over time, as newspapers downsize and even close, Web sites will be linking to fewer reliable news reports.
And if they don’t buy a paper, they won’t see that a medium, which at times got too rough with President Bush and the Republican Congress, can be just as tough on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. And when you get your news only from co-believers, as many of the left and right try to do, you miss things you need to know.
Of course, if we keep liberal newspapers alive, it’s only to show you how those city workers are screwing you, the hard-working American, out of your money:
Conservatives rooting for newspapers’ demise should be careful what they wish for. Yes, fewer reporters mean fewer biased stories about lesbian immigrants fighting an unsympathetic establishment. But there also won’t be as many stories about sanctuary city policies gone bad, the latest zany law out of San Francisco City Hall, or the growing bite that public employee pension systems are taking out of city and county services.
I’ve said it before, I’ll keep saying it: I will worry about supposedly exorbitant pension plans for people who clean the fucking streets when the last private jet is grounded because the CEO who owns it can’t afford the fuel anymore. Then we can get on to whether the people whopick up your roadkill are making a little more coin than is really necessary. Jesus tits.
Via Romenesko.
A.