The American Spectator

THE OUT OF TIMES
Re: William Murchison’s Authors of Their Own Doom:

Murchison is dead on. As a Chicago Tribune reporter from ‘68 to ‘73, I was possibly the last relatively conservative, state-school-educated army vet hired at the paper. The transition from ordinary joe reporter to elitist know-it-all was drastic and quick. Years later, when the Chicago Tribune Magazine was printing glowing articles about Bill Ayers, I wrote a note to the then Tribune ombudsman suggesting it was just possible that the Trib had lost touch with its target audience. Needless to say, I received no response.
— Steve Crews
Chicago, Illinois

Amen brother. However, there is another interesting point. The Watergate duo achieved their reputation by cooperating in a first class felony. For the assistant head of the FBI to leak raw FBI Files to reporters a penitentiary offense. So the great reputation of the duo was based upon a serious crime. Note: Chuck Colson went to jail for reading a FBI file without authorization.
— Willliam M. Selenke
Cincinnati, Ohio

I can testify to the truth of what Mr. Murchison says. I’ve worked at newspapers in five Texas towns and one in Tennessee. Three of the Texas papers maintained an aggressively liberal editorial policy, culling conservatives from their newsrooms and regularly hectoring and insulting their largely conservative readership. All three had problems maintaining circulation, problems that were evident as far back as the '80s, long before the Internet arose to play undertaker. In contrast, the one conservative paper I worked for, the Chattanooga Free Press, had bested its liberal rival, the Chattanooga Times, in circulation and revenue (even though the Free Press was an afternoon paper and therefore should have been losing readers to the Times, a morning paper).

Examples? The Bryan-College Station Eagle — in Aggieland, a rural and tech-college community where Texas A&M’s Corps of Cadets is the largest military class in the nation outside the U.S. service academies — decided to favor its readers with an illustrated Sunday cover story about a nearby nudist colony. That stunt cost the small-town paper more than sixty subscribers in a single day.

In Waco — home of the Southern Baptists’ Baylor University — the Tribune-Herald’s editor and two op-ed columnists were a three-man tag team in criticizing all things conservative, with a special disdain for the Religious Right. Conservative counterpoint from the lone newsroom dissenter (me) was squelched, lest the paper compromise its (self-imagined) reputation for objectivity and impartiality. Circulation? Shrinking.

In San Antonio — where readers are mostly either Catholic or conservative evangelicals in growing affinity with Catholics — the Express-News announced the election of Benedict XVI to the papacy with a banner headline calling him a “rigid theologian.” Alone in the newsroom, I deplored the choice of words, arguing that “rigid” was a term of reproach in this context, that “strict” would be a more neutral alternative, that it would be better to go with “God’s Rottweiler” (as some were calling him) than with “rigid theologian.” But no one else on duty saw it that way, and so the headline ran. The next day, so many angry phone calls and emails were received that the top editor had to apologize for the headline in his next Sunday column.

When I left the Express-News, my boss (one of the dwindling number of old-school journalists Mr. Murchison remembers so well) praised me at my going-away party as “an advocate for the reader.” That man has since taken early retirement, sad to say, and the Express-News’ circulation, ad revenue, page count and newsroom staff are all shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.
— Karl Spence
San Antonio, Texas

Note that Murchison is with the Dallas Morning News. They are at least as bad as any in flacking left-wing political ideology. Since 2003, they have had at least one “news” article each day about the War on Terror. My policy has been to read far enough into each article to conclude that it is political advocacy rather than news and then stop reading. Usually the first sentence is enough to do this — sometimes I can get through the entire first paragraph. As a result, all the information that I get on the GWOT is from sources other than our daily newspaper. Here’s what every DMN article reports:

-Bush is stupid

-Bush is evil 

-Bush has a low approval rating

-Our soldiers are murderers and torturers

-Muslims just want to live in peace