The Media Research Center continues its tunnel-vision interpretation of the state of the newspaper industry with a Nov. 21 NewsBusters post by Tom Blumer, who chortles at the declining value of New York Times Co. stock (he denigrates the Times as “Manhattan’s quaint little alternative newspaper”), accuses the Times of “insufferable bias,” then claims: “Yours truly and many others saw deep trouble ahead for the Times as early as the summer of 2005 if the paper didn’t stop its Bush-deranged, standards-compromised march towards the cliff.”
What “yours truly” is referring to is a post by Blumer on his BizzyBlog in which he rants against the Times for covering the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity by Bush administration officials, which Blumer designated as “Nadagate,” “non-scandal about which I refuse to blog in detail” with “main players, whose full names I refuse to type. It appears obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury is “nada” as far as Blumer is concerned.
Nowhere in either post is it noted what actual media analysts do when discussing declining newspaper circulation: the paradigm shift from print to online and the growing commoditization of news.
Blumer’s suggestion that the Times’ problems are solely attributable to its alleged liberal bias is a politically motivated interpretation unsupported by the facts.