Welcome to The Hotel California

The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and other "major" daily newspapers are much like the aging football player who finds his skills eroded and tries to stay around for another year by playing dirty. These dailies are just trying to hang on as their circulation and influence ebb.

FOX News' O'Reilly waxes hot over the bias in the newspapers like newspapers have mostly been honest and truthful throughout our history. This is ridiculous. Anybody who does any reading about our past knows that lying and bias is a journalistic staple in this country. The current bias is just a reversion to the old style papers before most of them closed due to TV.

O'Reilly, my IQ probably matches your golf handicap. My education stopped when I got into the Pasadena Playhouse on the GI Bill. I know you have read more books than I. But I just read a bio of Lincoln, the guy on the penny not the Lincoln Saltdogs baseball team, and Lincoln negotiated with newspaper editors to get their support in order to win in1864. Circa 1860 there was no such thing as a newspaper that was not a part of a political party. Nobody in the newspaper business told the truth about anything unless it was by accident. No newspaper in the U.S. had told the truth since Jefferson.

O'Reilly and many others tout something like "What the Founders had in mind". What the Founders had in Mind has zippo to do with anything. The Founders did not want "Factions", meaning political parties. The Founders didn't want real people voting for offices like senator and president. You had to be a property owning white male to vote at all when the "Founders" started.

We are seeing a reversion to the time when individual newspapers did NOT have that much influence. The LAT attack is a symptom of weakening influence. TV, the internet, particularly the "blogs" (which are no more than the old time pamphlets put out by everybody and reaching everybody eventually) have knocked daily papers down to circulations that are less than 10% of their local populations. I think "shock" over the LA Times is way over the top. They are scumbags in an old tradition, a tradition whose time has either past, or is returning once again.

Welcome to the Hotel California.