Beware of the Dogs

George Soro's has way too much time and money on his hands. Perhaps if we fixed McCain/Feingold and enacted a tax on net worth instead of income, he would just go away....

From Investors Business Daily:

Posted 12/5/2005
Media: MoveOn.org is starting a petition drive to save "watchdog journalism" at the L.A. Times and other Tribune Co. papers. Are they barking up the wrong tree?

The names of the newspapers change on its Web site. But the petitions all warn that while "corporate owners in Chicago reap large profits" from the Times, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel, even the Chicago Tribune itself, all say "there is no excuse for them to force our paper to abandon its responsibility to deliver strong watchdog journalism to the public" by "slashing" news jobs.

Actually, it's the Tribune Co.'s newspapers, not the public's, or MoveOn.org's, and while papers perform a public service, their job as businesses is to stay in business. And if that means paying attention to the bottom line, well, that's capitalism, something that billionaire and major MoveOn.org backer George Soros might appreciate.

Somehow, we doubt MoveOn would organize any petitions to prevent staff cuts at IBD or any of the watchdogs that keep an eye on them. Is it the messenger or the message they are trying to protect?

It's not just MoveOn.Org's favorite newspapers that are having problems. Of the country's 20 largest papers, only two managed small circulation gains in the six months ended in September. The overall 2.6% drop in weekday circulation was the biggest since 1991.

Executives at the Times and the Tribune — the two biggest papers owned by the Tribune Co. — said they took MoveOn's campaign as a public acknowledgment of the value of their news-gathering operations. But the support of a group ideologically somewhere to the left of Karl Marx is hardly an endorsement we would treasure.

It is in fact an endorsement that speaks volumes about the increasingly leftward tilt of mainstream dailies in their news columns and editorial pages, one of the factors in their declining circulations.

Are they watchdogs or attack dogs?

Part of their problem is bias, and part is the rise of new media from Internet bloggers to talk radio to 24-hour cable TV news. The days are long gone when three networks and a handful of newspapers could control what we saw, heard, read and talked about.

Ironically, MoveOn.org's petitions to save newspaper jobs are posted on its Internet Web site.
But it's not just the medium; it's the message. CNN and MSNBC provide 24-hour TV news too, but Fox more often than not laps them in the ratings. While conservatives dominate talk radio, Air America — the liberals' attempt to compete in that marketplace of ideas — has listenership in major markets too small to even measure.

After the Swift Boat controversy broke in last year's presidential campaign, Chicago Tribune managing editor James O'Shea cited "too many places to get information" as a " growing problem" and fretted that newspapers could no longer control the flow of information.

Neither can MoveOn.org.