Why newspapers are dying

The Purple Avenger at Ace of Spades wrote a post yesterday about the editorial board of the Connecticut Post telling their readers which subjects they shouldn’t be writing letters to the paper about. PA writes that their number one complaint about the readers is the fact they constantly blame poor Barney Franks and Chris Dodd for the our current economic problems.

Further down the piece, the board complains;

This is a big one — socialism. Really? Did I miss Obama’s plan to nationalize the oil industry?

Is that the only thing that would earmark the Obama Administration as socialists? He did have a policy plank that called for the nationalization of healthcare. That’s not socialism? Taking money from one group of people to fund another group of people’s poor choices isn’t socialism?

The notion that the tens of billions of dollars we spend killing people in Iraq could be better spent on schools and hospitals in this country is not radical. Huge majorities in this country support a robust social safety net, so that people who experience a run of misfortune don’t lose everything. All other industrialized nations on the planet have some form of universal health care. None of this is controversial.

Yeah, well, spending ten of billions of dollars killing “people” is what the Federal government is supposed to be doing. Spending money on schools and hospitals is not something the Constitution says the Federal government should be doing. See the difference? I think if “huge majorities in this country” knew what a “robust social safety net” was going to cost them, they wouldn’t be so huge.

And those “other industrialized nations” really are socialist entities themselves. Some even put it right in the names of their majority political parties. And they’re beginning to realize what the costs of their follies are, and they’ve begun to cut back on their spending. Please pay attention.

And helping people who’ve had a “run of misfortune” is why there are charities, but funding a multi-generational lifestyle of sloth is what a corrupt and lazy government does to buy votes for a particular political party.

Maybe those correspondents who fret about our economic choices are happy with the fact that while this is the richest country in the world, there are 41 nations with lower infant mortality rates. At the same time, most workers in “socialist” Western Europe get four to five weeks vacation to start with. What are we supposed to be scared of again?

Yeah, those countries that have four to five weeks vacation mainly do that as an accounting trick to reach higher employment. All of those nations have near-double-digit unemployment and lower productivity per worker per hour than the US and that’s why we’re the economic powerhouse we are. But that’s the part the Left wants to change.

I suppose the Connecticut Post doesn’t want to discuss reality, and they don’t want their readers to be informed beyond the nuggets that the Post tosses them to keep them ignorant. And no one can figure out why the print news industry is failing.

Category: Media, Society