In a May 9 Accuracy in Media blog post, Don Irvine has a grand time smacking around the Washington Post for losing money:
What Graham is witnessing is the continuing decline of printed newspapers like The Washington Post. But rather than take bold, decisive action to compete in a new environment, he continues to cling to the notion that Washington wants and needs a liberal paper of record. The marketplace seems to be saying otherwise.
Irvine is careful not to mention the fact that of the major Washington newspapers, only the Post is subject to the whims of the marketplace.
As we’ve documented, conservative newspapers have a long history of being nothing more than money-losing playthings of owners who can afford to lose millions upon millions of dollars every year in order to promulgate their right-wing agenda.
The Washington Times, which has has been subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars since its inception nearly 30 years ago, was recently sold back to its original owner, a branch of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, for $1. The Washington Examiner, owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz, simply cannot be making money given the unhealthy market for newspapers and its mostly-free distribution model (being privately owned, it doesn’t make its finances public). But even it gets touched with a budget squeeze every once in a while — in an apparently economizing effort, its White House correspondent wasn’t replaced with a new person; instead, two reporters on suburban beats will split White House coverage.
Perhaps the reason Irvine is gloating over the Post losing money is because he knows his own preferred newspapers are not subject the same whims of the marketplace.