This story on Hot Air (about an intelligent new strategy the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is trying to keep themselves afloat) got me thinking: why all the liberal angst about newspapers going out of business? Just think of the environmental benefits! Think of all the trees cut down every year to produce the reams and reams of newsprint used by the newspapers that are now critically endangered (as well as the ones that have already gone extinct); how environmentally unenlightened of these heartless major corporations to insist that they must be allowed to distribute “a five-pound lump of paper” to millions of people every day in order to do their jobs. Surely in this Age of Obama they should be required to Go Green just like everyone else and spare our nation’s forests, right? Shouldn’t we view the demise of dead-tree editions across the country as a good thing, rather than go looking for ways to prop up their environmental rapacity by putting them on the public dole?. . . OK, be honest with me—is that too far over the top? In all seriousness, I love a good newspaper (though they’re a lot fewer and farther between than those lamenting the state of the industry like to pretend), but it does occur to me that they’re getting a very different break from the Left in this country than a lot of industries. That’s no real surprise, of course; after all, they’re a structural component of the American Left, plus they get to set the terms in which their current peril is reported, analyzed, and discussed—an advantage that was never given to the PR flacks for companies like Philip Morris or Enron. Even so, as I think about it, I’m still a little surprised that I haven’t heard word one about what their failure could potentially do to pulp production in this country, either in terms of its environmental advantages or in terms of additional unemployment. I can’t help thinking that if there were somehow an equivalent failure on the conservative side of the political spectrum, we’d be getting stories with headlines like “Silver Lining of Industry Collapse: Will Save Millions of Acres of Forest, Experts Say.”
Awesome question… you better believe that this would be covered in a completely different way if it were Human Events or the Weekly Standard looking at having to close.
Interestingly enough, it isn’t an “if”–Human Events, sad to say, is in danger of folding, thanks to a USPS rate structure that was written by lobbyists for the likes of Time Warner.