Traditional media outlets are dying and savvy conservative
politicians have taken to ignoring them — or hastening their
demise. Instead of subjecting themselves to heavy-handed
interviews and biased coverage, Republicans are finding other
ways to reach the public with their campaign messages. It’s an
approach the McCain-Palin ticket may have adopted too late.
McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis asked, “Why would we want to
throw Sarah Palin into a cycle of piranhas called the news media
that have nothing better to ask questions about than her personal
life and her children?”
In McCain’s Arizona, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio recently
took the right’s campaign against the MSM to a new level by
running an anti-media television ad. In the ad, which touts his
record as Sheriff, Arpaio instructs voters to throw the local
newspapers away. “You can never believe everything you read,”
Arpaio says, holding up copies of the Arizona Republic
and the East Valley Tribune. “So when these are
delivered to your house, they belong in the trash.” He then
throws the papers into a garbage bin.
This year, knowing full well in advance the Arizona
Republic was not going to endorse either of them for
reelection given the paper’s constant negative coverage of them,
Arpaio and Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas told the paper
“no thank you” to an interview. In a joint press release, the two
said in part, “the Arizona Republic board has been one of the
biggest voices against steps we have successfully taken to reduce
Valley crime. Even the paper’s own lawyer has been opposing us
outside of its own pages…They will talk about our opponents in
glowing terms while ignoring their own research which would alert
the public to embarrassing, disgusting or way too soft on crime
information about our opponents.”
With newspaper circulation rates declining, it has finally become
safe for conservative politicians to pick fights with people who
buy ink by the barrel. According to numbers
just released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the
Arizona Republic’s circulation has shrunk 5.5% since
2007. Over the six years prior to that, the Republic’s
circulation dropped nearly 11% — even though Arizona’s
population grew by 20%. Circulation of major newspapers around
the country had been declining about two percent each year, until
last year when their decline increased; by 3.7 percent on
weekdays and 4.6 percent on Sundays.
The Republic used to be a middle of the road newspaper
until Keven Willey became editorial page editor in 1998. Under
her lead, the paper took a hard turn to the left. Willey left in
2002 to become editorial page editor of the Dallas Morning
News. That newspaper has had a steep decline in circulation
throughout Willey’s tenure, most recently decreasing 11.7% since
2007. Randy Lovely took over as managing editor and then
executive editor of the Republic when Willey left,
continuing its more liberal slant (though the paper did endorse
John McCain for president).
At the same time the Republic began declining, a
right-leaning blog called espressopundit.com emerged and devoted
considerable coverage to the Republic’s demise. Blog
owner Greg Patterson had access to inside information, revealing
in advance layoffs and other shakeups at the paper, accompanied
by photographs of a sinking ship.
The other major newspaper in the Phoenix area, the East
Valley Tribune, recently announced that it would no longer
include Scottsdale and Tempe, two of the biggest cities in its
coverage area, and was reducing publication of its print edition
to four days a week.
Newspapers aren’t having much success moving operations online.
Graphs from alexa.com show that the Republic’s
azcentral.com site has been gradually
losing visitors over the past year, and traffic to
eastvalleytribune.com has also
declined.
Refusing to interview with the liberal newspapers is catching on
around the state. Republican legislative candidate Frank Antenori
in southern Tucson announced that he would not be seeking the
endorsement of both the Arizona Daily and the Tucson
Citizen, saying his time would be more effectively spent
knocking on doors. Antenori won on Tuesday.
The most popular political blog in the state, the conservative
sonoranalliance.com, gets around 1,000 unique visitors each day.
Considering only 4% of newspaper subscribers read editorial
pages, and the Republic is down to only 361,333
subscribers, that means only 14,453 of subscribers are likely
reading its editorial pages. Depending on how many of
sonoranalliance.com’s readers are repeat visitors each day, there
may now be more people reading that blog than are reading the
Republic’s editorial pages. It is time to start giving
reputable blogs the status historically given newspapers, because
they are gradually becoming the newspapers of the future. Just
like Fox News and talk radio destroyed the hegemony of the major
TV news networks, blogs are now taking down the left’s last media
bastion, print media.
