THE TYGRRRR EXPRESS

The Jayson Blair (aka New York) Times is on the verge of collapse. It is in free fall. It did not have to be this way. It seems that they followed the Palestinian business model for success.

For those wondering what the conflagration in the Gaza Strip has to do with a newspaper being printed in New York, the simplistic answer is…bad decisions. What makes it worse is that these were bad avoidable decisions.

Let’s start with the Jayson Blair Times. Everybody knows that the editorial pages are liberal. As a conservative, I have zero objection to this. They have every right to be liberal. I am a conservative, and my column has a conservative bias. However, I freely admit this bias. The JBT denied its liberal bias to the point it was laughable. They did everything but run an editorial accusing George W. Bush of lighting puppies and kittens on fire and eating them. Like Palestinian leaders, their editorial venom was almost pathological.

However, even this would not be enough to destroy the paper, because the editorials are one or two pages. The rest of the paper was hard news. It was well written, and it got the stories right. Not anymore. Besides the crossword puzzle, which I am told is the best in the world, the JBT has simply become a tabloid. In fact, tabloids began scooping them, the best example being Matt Drudge breaking the Bill Clinton affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Worse than being scooped, the JBT started letting bias infect its hard news columns. On the day Iraqis voted, a major story, the JBT chose that day to run the Bush domestic wiretapping scandal story. A plot to blow up JFK airport was on page 37. Good news from Iraq is buried deep inside the paper. Worse than bias, the paper started getting stories wrong. It then buried those corrections, again, far deep inside the paper.

Humans make mistakes. I wrote an article predicting the outcome of “The Apprentice.” My analysis was dead wrong, and the next day I issued an equally prominent mea culpa. Credibility is all writers have. It is all anyone has. Without it, we are done. The New York Times forever became the Jayson Blair Times when they put their liberal ideological agenda ahead of quality writing and reporting. Jayson Blair was promoted because he was black. This perversion of affirmative action was an insult to white and black Americans that were qualified for a job that this man was given. He fabricated stories. That black eye to what was once a well written paper has not subsided.

The JBT forgot to stick to the basics, which was to get the story first, get the story right, and describe it with rhetorical flourish. They simply strayed from the core of what they were. This is described well in Laura Ingraham’s book “Shut up and sing.” Ellen Degeneres did not have her show cancelled because she is a lesbian. She simply stopped being funny, and then blamed the network for declining ratings. Rosie O’Donnel is now known as a left wing lunatic, but when she was a VJ on VH1 she was very funny.

Everything comes down to likability. It is how we choose friends, lovers, presidential candidates, and what tv shows to watch and newspapers to read. The JBT became the Gore/Kerry of newspapers. They were smarter than everybody else, but the lower class masses of ordinary people simply did not like them. The New York Post is a great read because they are like President Bush…simple, easy to understand, and downright likable. The paper can be lighthearted, but it is a fun read. When they make a mistake, they issue major retractions. Humility does help. The Wall Street journal is brilliant. Their economics columns, unlike those of Paul Krugman at the JBT, are actually about…economics. Yes, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal are conservative, but that is peripheral. They are well written.

The JBT coasted on its reputation and good name. They also made a calculated decision to tilt further to the left and develop a core audience. Surely there are enough liberals in America to keep it afloat. Unfortunately, they miscalculated there as well. Many Jews are liberals, and Jews do not want to read a paper that is almost as sympathetic to the Palestinans as Al Jazeera. The editorial pages occasionally border on anti-semitism. This further reduced their readership, since many Jews are actually not self-hating.

It is the same reason Air America failed. It was not because they were liberal. It is because they were elitist, unprofessional, and worst of all…the biggest sin in any form of media…they were boring. Rush Limbaugh has 20 million listeners, but they are not all conservatives. Many of them just like him because he is funny. He entertains first. He is provocative, but never boring.

The JBT is bleeding dollars. The way out of this mess would be to improve the quality of the brand, but instead they are raising prices and lowering quality. This is a death spiral. Ironically, since their readers are liberal, they are actually giving liberals a taste of their own philosophy. A tax on liberals only. This is delightful. I wish the federal government would do this.

The Palestinian business model has been what the JBT adopted. The Palestinian business model is to divide people into groups. Those in your group are good, everyone else is evil. When the Jews left Gaza, Palestinians had nothing to do but engage in fratricide. They cannibalized their own, and are dwindling in numbers by the day. If they ever decide to reach across the aisle, be openminded, and expand their circle of people allowed to exist, they might find a receptive audience.

If the JBT would (figuratively) blow itself up, start over, and dedicate itself first and foremost to being a well written paper that many people would want to read, they might be taken off life support and breathe on their own. People will read things they disagree with if it is of a high quality. Their other option is to continue to narrow their audience to the few people who want to read something smug, arrogant, biased, poorly written, often wrong, and boring. The JBT seems to have chosen this option, placing themselves squarely along the lines of other failures, from Air America to Palestinian society.

eric

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 10:34 am and is filed under POLITICS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.