The American Spectator

Jeremiah| 2.22.09 @ 2:47PM

Re: "The continuing need for newspapers"

You conservatives don't know how disorienting and completely confusing it is for a poor liberal like myself to visit your sites or tune into your radio programs.

I like conservative media well enough. You're a find bunch of Americans, and I salute you.

However, we've grown so accustomed to an outraged, hypberbolic fury directed at reporters and journalists, that we don't know how to respond when we read that something illustrates the continued "need for newspapers."

I whole-heartedly agree with this idea. To hate newspapers is to hate America. How do people think we became a nation, anyway? But usually we find people here seeming to suggest that Rush Limbaugh and a few right wing websites are enough, as long as they're supplemented by a few minutes in front of the Fox Headlines.

(Nevermind that Limbaugh and others routinely USE information they find in newspapers to make they're points. The idea usually is that Limbaugh has some kind of privileged ability to select from newspapers what is good, while trashing the rest.)

Will you now join the rest of us in asking which newspapers Sarah Palin reads? Or is it still enough for her to say, "All, any"? Will you protest when Limbaugh and Hannity toast the "death of the newspaper"? Or are you now more content than ever with wilfull blindness?

I'm just asking for things to be clarified for me.

Cliff| 2.22.09 @ 4:29PM

Will you now join the rest of us in asking which newspapers Sarah Palin reads?

No, because it's a stupid question. The starting presumption is that she obviously must not because she's stupid, which, actually, is in its self stupid.

Nobody else would be asked the question because "obviously" they are smart because people like you say so. Nobody would ask Hillary Clinton what newspapers she read, and if they did, she'd tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine if she didn't have a good reason for answering. And she'd be right to do so.

Will you protest when Limbaugh and Hannity toast the "death of the newspaper"? Or are you now more content than ever with wilfull blindness?

Newspapers are irrelevant. Only news is important. Newspapers are dying because they are a dinosaur way of getting news.

Find me where any conservative, including Rush/Hannity, who, btw, don't represent the conservative movement anymore then Michael Moore or Janine Garafalo represent the liberal movement, who called for the death of media and news, and I'll apologize. But I don't think I'll have to.

I'm just asking for things to be clarified for me.

No your not, your a psudo-intellectual, know-nothing jackass preaching a sermon to the wretched masses unenlightened by your brilliance.

Jeremiah| 2.22.09 @ 4:45PM

Cliff --

What grounds other than Limbaugh's and Hannity's frantic and repeated claims that "newspapers are irrelevant" do you have to make this claim?

Did you ever think that Limbaugh and Hannity relentlessly assault "the media" because it is "the media" that are they're primary competitors in the market?

You need to ask WHY you think newspapers are irrelevant. Let me ask you: have you ever spent three or four weeks reading the Times? And I'm not talking about the editorial page, I'm talking about the actual news.

If not, how do you even know what's there except from what your movements putative leaders tell you?

Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh have decided thou shalt not read.

Are you satisfied with this?

The current intellectual squalors of your movement (Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin) won't be relieved by conserivatives reading less, I think I can guarantee you.

Jeremiah| 2.22.09 @ 4:46PM

not "they're primary" but "their primary competitors"

apologies: I'm in a hurry

Jim Lowery| 2.22.09 @ 5:19PM

In a world of innocent until the pussy-whipped media decides you're guilty, Condit should not hold his breath for a meaningful apology from the media on this one.

bustoff| 2.22.09 @ 5:33PM

If journalists spent more time doing this sort of investigative work, and less time being political sycophants for Barack Obama, people would still want to read newspapers. It was investigative journalism, not flavor-of-the-week pop culture worship, that cemented the place of newspapers as a vital part of a free society. Newspapers have only themselves to blame for allowing cheap sensationalism and slanted politics to destroy the foundation of their market. Newspapers possess the tools to bring themselves to ruin, but they also possess the same tools that would return them to greatness. They are ultimately responsible for what they choose to be.

J. Kelley| 2.22.09 @ 6:20PM

Here is the Liberal Newspaper business model. Poke a sharp stick in the eye of halve their customers. Then the enternet comes along and they lose another quater of their customers. And they never ever change. Rush Limbaugh is popular because there is a demand for what he does. Fox News Network moved in first place with Cable News because there was a hunger for fair and balenced news. It is as simple as that. The same goes for ABC,CBS and NBC news. They give away halve of the market up front.

Bob K.| 2.22.09 @ 6:24PM

Newspapers and their cousins in the Electronic Media began to lose their influence when they forgot the original purpose of the 1st amendment which is stated very simply beginning with the 1st 5 words. They began to believe the silly notion that they were the "4th Estate," on a par with Congress, The Executive and the Supreme Court instead of being the Watchdog of Freedom that our Founding Fathers intended them to be.

Jeremiah| 2.22.09 @ 6:39PM

Nonsense. You people speak and think nonsense, absolute rubbish, about the press.

No press, no democracy.

And PLENTY of reporters are doing investigative work that has nothing to do with praising Obama.

If a young reporter thought for a half-second he had a Watergate-like story that would bring down Obama, he'd stay up night and day to get it written, and every reporter in the world would follow suit. Depend upon it.

Alan Brooks| 2.22.09 @ 6:44PM

Jeremiah is not merely making statements disguised as questions, he is digging into us to pick our brains and find what he can get.

Alan Brooks| 2.22.09 @ 6:49PM

Jeremiah,
you are the rubbisher. no serious reporter will ever try to bring Obama down Watergate-style; he and his family are instant royalty, black icons forever and ever. his daughters will become millionaires and go into politics.
his wife will end up like Oprah (without the dieting).
Obama himself will become a billionaire, like Al Gore.

Alan Brooks| 2.22.09 @ 6:56PM

...you are the sort of person who has to have everything explained to him over & over, so here goes (again):
no really serious reporter will try to bring Obama down because Obama is untouchable. you do remember how Clinton was impeached but not removed from office? well, Obama will never even be impeached, no matter what.

J. Kelley| 2.22.09 @ 6:58PM

So many Reporters have "tingles running up their legs", they probably would not do a watergate type story. But the watergate story was not a great reporting story. It was a disgruntled man in the FBI who was was passed over for promotion, guiding a story that two Liberal reporters wrote for him. It would be wonderful for reporters to do their job. We needed some reporting on how a political operator worked his way through the Chicage Machine. And became President with no real reporting on his background.

ruth| 2.22.09 @ 7:19PM

Jeremiah, you are such a royal ass.

Interested Conservative| 2.22.09 @ 7:23PM

What an interesting digression from Mr. Collin's original point, which I took to be the need for "newspapers" to report news. This includes, and often is best expressed, in devoting resources to extended analysis and reporting.

All of which seems to have confused Jeremiah.

El Rushbo's short-hand phrase of the "drive by" media" is the exact opposite of the Post's series described here. Worse yet, that seems to be motive force behind most of the so-called MSM.

It's the media's failing to follow the news which is creating their problem, and only thrown in relief by stories such as this. The critics don't seem too responsible for that error in priorities.

danny| 2.22.09 @ 8:24PM

j kelley
half man half as in 1/2

danny| 2.22.09 @ 8:24PM

j kelley
half man half as in 1/2

Jeremiah| 2.22.09 @ 8:34PM

Collins's point seemed to me to be to remind people that newspapers are the news organizations that put resources into length investigative journalism.

Do you think Sean Hannity or Fox News pays reporters to work hunches that might take months to yield a complicated story?

Only newspapers can or will do that.

That's why they're essential.

Again: some of you should try actually READING a newspaper, instead of contenting yourself with what competitors in the media market say about them.

Of course Rush says he hates newspapers. He's COMPETING with them. (Of course, in reality, most of the media types -- including Rush -- read newspapers. They just don't want YOU to, and you should ask yourself why that might be.)

Remember kids, reading is fundamental.

ruth| 2.22.09 @ 8:39PM

So is common courtesy.

Alan Brooks| 2.22.09 @ 8:55PM

So is jeremiah growing a brain. That is fundamental.

Rush, whatever his flaws, is a genius. and he isn't even really supposed to be fact-based as journalism IS supposed to be. I dont care if Rush doesnt want us to read newspapers; we probably get more from him than we'll get from newspapers, at least it is all in one place, 3 hours a day, five days a week.
what do you know about Rush? do you listen to him? if so, then you must like him.

you DO understand?

ConservativeWanderer| 2.22.09 @ 9:14PM

Fellow conservatives, arguing with Jeremiah is a lot like beating your head against the wall... it only feels good when you stop (unless you're a masochist).

Clearly Jeremiah thinks that online news outlets are incapable of writing complicated stories, only those that actually print on paper can do that.

He also doesn't seem to realize that one can both read newsprint and listen to talk radio... the two are not mutually exclusive.

And he calls us out of touch.

ruth| 2.22.09 @ 9:23PM

Jeremiah has an agenda, we don't. Hi, Alan and CW.

Alan Brooks| 2.22.09 @ 9:59PM

too bad we can't have this troll go bye bye.
i'm enraged he called me a racist, my family-- all of us-- treated blacks well, no matter how badly they treated us. our parents were caricatures of guilty liberals; dad was a guilty1930s ex-Commie, mom was the daughter of a liberal Methodist minister, who knew Eleanor Roosevelt.
but Jeremiah would never apologize, so up his.
and up daphne's... well, you know.
for a dumb tw*t like daffy to criticize Israel can only be described as disgusting.

Bob M| 2.23.09 @ 6:20AM

No leave the troll alone... with every comment he proves how little he knows and how irrelevant his argument is.

The MSM are lap dogs of the liberal agenda, and all idiots like Jerimiah will make condescending comments that we don't spend days pouring over the NYTimes... well jerkoff we have and that's why they are going bankrupt. Nobody is going to pay for a crappy product... well until your socialism president takes them over too!

So go back to correcting peoples spelling and grammar mistakes like most of you over-educated/underachievers always do!

Jay| 2.23.09 @ 6:58AM

One does wonder why newspapers do an often very good job at ferreting out criminals by attacking the police, thus stirring them to action. For the results they are to be commended. For their methods, not so much.

It seems obvious to me and many others that the media's aim is not to solve the crime, or root out the corruption by conservatives, but to destroy the faith of citizenz in their institutions. In this endeavor newspapers have been largely successful.

They have printed unimaginably derogatory stories by the hundreds of J. Edgar Hoover and thereby created the belief that the FBI is a corrupt and badly manipulated organization. They constantly derogate the military and the court system.

This slanted, always to the negative, journalism has destroyed America's belief in itself. But the media's absolute anti- American bias has no doubt put the radical left's juggernaught in top gear by it's cheerleading (and that is a bad thing for the left is about control), but the media is no hoist by it;s own petard.

In it's campaign to destroy America to put the letfist totalitarians in power, the media destroyed America's faith in another institution: the media.

Today newspaper circulation is dropping like the stock market after the democrat stimulus. The network television news can't find viewers. And news magazines have the same problem. That's a good thing. Because they have been co-opted by the radical left.

Now the left is imposing censorship to counter the loss of these propaganda outlets. They call it the "Fairness Doctrine". It is anything but. It will require you and I to be force fed propaganda that Josef Goebbels would be proud to have authored in the same vein as Air America - the radio network for radical leftists, by radical leftists, about radical leftists, that not even radical leftists would listen to.

Yhey're back and their are crating our own Cuba right here, right now.

Echohawk| 2.23.09 @ 7:29AM

Americans are loyal to their political parties; we also believe in fair play. The MSM have been trying to undermine conservatives and our ideas for decades; convervatives have long since learned to turn away to other news outlets.
The MSM has to compete for a small slice of ideologically-similar readership. It's no wonder they're in free-fall.

BD| 2.23.09 @ 8:21AM

Jeremiah,

Read or listen again...they are disagreeing with many newspapers, etc, and challenging (and mocking them) but not calling for them to be silent. The conservative talkers are disagreeing publicly. The liberal politicians are seeking to silence, or bully their way onto conservative programs (think: fairness doctrine)

No-one is trying to shut you up are they ?

Not Chicken Little| 2.23.09 @ 8:29AM

The best way to succeed in the communications business whether it be TV, radio or print media, is to relentlessly search for the truth, and tell the truth. Rush and others do that; the old MSM does not. Instead they have an agenda that is not the truth and they push that. People know when they're being sold a bill of goods or when some con man is trying to pull the wool over their eyes, and they don't like it. If an organization or person loses the trust they once had it is damn near impossible to get it back. But the presstitutes sold out long ago and now they are reaping what they have sown.

JP| 2.23.09 @ 10:36AM

" whole-heartedly agree with this idea. To hate newspapers is to hate America. How do people think we became a nation, anyway?"

Who hates Newspapers, Jerimiah? You offer a strawman's arguement. You may wish to ask this question to the citizens of LA, Detroit, Seattle, Chicago, and New York. All liberal cities (very liberal, btw), that no longer support the institution you demand we prop up. It is not conservatives that have abandoned these newspapers, but liberals. Conservatives are in such small numbers in these cities that even if they all took out subscriptions these newspapers would still go under.

Jeremiah, you may want to move your soapbox to another corner. Also, you may want to ask yourself how these liberal newspapers fail to report on the corruption and incompetence of thier liberal masters?