Topic: NewsBusters
Randy Hall complains in a May 26 NewsBusters post that "wildly liberal" New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio said he "will not shed a tear" if the conservataive New York Post goes out of business. Hall added: "It’s always refreshing when liberals join conservatives in having an adversarial relationship with those in the press. Of course, the Democrats often hope their enemies go under while Republicans don’t take such a hostile view of their adversaries."
First: As we've noted, if the Post were subject to the normal laws of supply and demand, the Post would have gone out of business years ago. It has lost money for decades and stays in business only becasuse its owner, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (also owner of Fox News) wants a New York newspaper presence.
Second: Hall has apparently not been reading the website that publishes him. The MRC enjoys rooting for media outlets it doesn't like to go out of business. For example, here's how it cheers for the failure of that other NYC paper, the New York Times:
- In 2008, Tom Blumer gloated over the low stock price of what he mockingly called "Manhattan's quaint little alternative paper" and insisting that the market thought the paper to be "worse than worthless." Blumer declared that "There's a steep price to pay for insufferable bias, and NYT's shareholders are paying it" and that "The market is telling the company's shareholders that they'd be better off hanging on to the Red Sox and their interest in the headquarters building -- and shuttering or selling off whatever they can of everything else."
- In 2009, Blumer further chortled over the New York Times Co.'s suspension of its quarterly dividend, sneering: "Perhaps we have arrived at the point many predicted would come to pass: The 'venerable' New York Times may no longer be the national newspaper of record."
- That same year, Stephen Gutowski highlighted a right-wing blogger writing that "it's possible to take some" joy over the Times' financial problems and seemed giddy at the adea that "analysts give [the Times] less than a year to survive."
- And Noel Sheppard was even more giddy at the idea of "the end of his paper being one of the leading proponents of socialism in a capitalist democracy. One can dream, right?"
Of course, the Times survived that financial crisis and is now a money-maker, remained influential, and its stock is doing fine -- much to the chagrin of NewsBusters and its Media Research Center parent. Perhaps Hall should be a little more attentive.
