A new report to be issued this month by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, predicts that most newspapers will be dead in 5 years. Of course many are already, and most of those that remain have drastically cut back. According to Newspaper Deathwatch and Paper cuts it won’t be pretty, and many of my conservative friends think it’s well-deserved, poetic justice. Personally, having extensive experience as a reporter (I worked for about a month for the Eagle Pass News Guide when I was in college), I disagree. I think the country needs newspapers, and I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for them here, but it demands change, and that never comes easily; especially for liberals.
The news industry wants to blame all of its problems on the Internet and the digital revolution, and I’m sure that has a lot to do with it, but the main factor is the overwhelming liberal bias exhibited by most papers, and the alienation of many subscribers and readers that goes with it. The two that my wife and I subscribe to are no exceptions. The editorial staffs are all liberal, and they do their best to press a liberal agenda, both in the news and editorial sections.
What the Internet (and Fox News), has brought us is news that’s not strained through some liberal mind. They can no longer spoon-feed most of us, but they do exert great influence over those who still rely solely on them for information; those that either don’t have access to, or don’t use the Internet. Virtually all polling data show that most Americans consider themselves conservative, sometimes by a margin of over 2-1. Leon Hale, who has been writing for Texas newspapers for probably 50 years, says that 2 things he never writes about are religion and politics, because he knows if he does, he’s going make half his readers mad. Maybe the newspapers think that they’ve already made the Republicans mad, and if they tell the truth about the Democrats, they’ll lose the rest of their readers.
After both the Chronicle and Facts recently carried pieces critical of the new Texas Voter ID law, I sent both of them letters disagreeing, and the following is the one I sent to the Facts, which actually had reprinted a piece from the Lubbock paper. Both papers print my letters more often than not, but I knew neither of them would print these, because they will not allow anyone to disparage the Democrat party in their pages:
So the Lubbock Avalanche thinks that Texas’ new voter ID law is a waste of time and money, but I doubt they had a problem with the taxpayer’s financing the Democrat voter fraud organization ACORN, who, according to the King Street Patriots, registered 23,000 fraudulent voters prior to the 2010 elections in Harris County alone.
According to Republican State Representative Jose Aliseda of Bee County, the house heard testimony in 2008 that there were 12 counties in Texas in which there were more registered voters than there were eligible voting age citizens, and in 2007 the State Auditor’s Office found that Texas had 49,049 registered voters who may have been ineligible to vote. The problem is that without a photo ID it is difficult if not impossible to tell. Given the Democrat Party’s history of voter fraud, from the questionable South Texas ballots that sent LBJ to the US Senate in 1948, to the ACORN outrages, voters need every assurance that when they go to the polls they’re participating in a fraud-free election. How about some acclaim for the Lawmakers who made this happen?
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 10:00AM