It will come as no surprise to anyone (except, no doubt, the newspaper industry) that traditional newspapers are dying faster than scantily clad coeds in a slasher film. Which is why the Council of Economic Advisers has just awarded the newspaper business the coveted title of "America's fastest-shrinking industry" measured by actual jobs lost.
The culprit being blamed is that old devil "technology" - you know, the same evil force that Barack Obama cited when saying that ATM machines have stolen the jobs of bank tellers, kiosks at airports have taken the jobs of ticket agents, and Turbotax has eliminated the need for accountants unless you're a moron, a tax cheat or, in Timothy Geithner's case, both.
But in our opinion, the problem for many newspapers wasn't that the Internet could deliver news more quickly...it's that the Internet showed many people that they weren't really receiving "news" at all.
Instead, there was left-leaning propaganda picked up from the New York Times, the AP, Reuters, and - especially - the Whitehouse. And because many newspapers didn't want to write anything bad about Barack Obama (as they had about George Bush), they found that they didn't really have anything left to write about. It's not like they could fill many pages with the good news coming out of the Obamaconomy.
And the ugliness didn't stop with spin-heavy news stories and editorials. Even the "funny pages" stopped being funny thanks to unending diatribes from the likes of Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau, who spent this past week running a series of cartoons accusing Texas of raping women by insisting on pre-abortion ultrasounds prior to performing abortions (although oddly, Trudeau hasn't condemned the many actual rapes committed by his pals in the OWS movement).
Trudeau says he was inspired to do the cartoons because he was so deeply offended that Rush Limbaugh used the word "slut" to describe a woman...unlike Trudeau himself, who ran a series in September 2011 in which he accused Sarah Palin of being a trash-talking, racist, cheating wife and unfit mother in a push-up bra. A series so offensive that Hope n' Change can say with 100% certainty that it cost the Dallas Morning News at least one decades-long subscription. Ours.
Happily, the news about newspapers isn't all bad. The Wall Street Journal is going strong because it knows the difference between news and editorials - and presents both with a level of excellence which is worth paying for.
And smaller, localized papers are still doing well by concentrating on community interests - a good example being the South Shore Standard, a weekly newspaper which has long featured Hope n' Change Cartoons on their Opinion Page (eat your heart out, Eric Holder - I'm a Constitutionally-protected journalist!)
Still, it's sad to see traditional newspapers increasingly writing their own obituaries. But it was inevitable once they decided to stop writing about the dangers of, and damage from, this presidency.
Surprisingly, after three years it isn't the FISH that are giving off the stench.
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