Demise Of The Denver Post Has Nada To Do With "Too Much Liberal Content"

The last gasp of the "Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire" now appears to be only weeks away. A steady stream of news regarding cuts to reporters, editors, photographers, videographers, page designers and  others, now threatens to end the 125 year run of The Denver Post which has won 9 Pulitzer prizes. For those of us who love to get our news and information from  hardcopy, print papers - this is an unmitigated disaster. Especially as the only alternative here in Colorado Springs is the cartoon paper known as The Gazette, which I take to be the print version of "Fox and Friends".

My love of newspapers probably began when,  as a seven or eight -year old,  I'd take out the "Green Sheet" from The Milwaukee Journal and work its various puzzles and games, and read the science articles.  Thenceforth in every place I lived, whether Miami (Herald), New Orleans (States Item and Times Picayune), Barbados (Nation, Advocate News), Baltimore (Sun, Evening Sun), or Colorado, I'd be sure to have the daily paper delivered.

There was something special about opening any of them up in the mornings to read the news, cup of Java at the ready with a few English muffins and avocado - maybe a hard boiled egg and slice of bacon.  But alas, in each locality, retrenchment often followed - usually preceded by losing the 2nd paper of the day . For Milwaukee,  it was the Sentinel (later folded into the Journal to become the Milwaukee Journal -Sentinel). For Miami it was the demise of The Miami News leaving only the Herald, and for Baltimore it was the folding up of the Evening Sun - - the paper that gave the great H.L. Mencken his start.

In the case of The Denver Post, I began to get worried some ten years ago when a number of liberal reporters like Cindy Rodriguez and Michael Booth were rendered redundant.. At that turning point the paper lost many of its liberal readers, and in truth, I cut my subscription down to 5 days a week.  I confess to being less interested in reading the blabber of conservative mouthpieces like Thomas Sowell, or their many clones hailing from assorted "think tanks" like the Hudson Institute, The American Enterprise Institute and others.

Then, in the last two years the Post's proportion of ads increased significantly while the original reporting - whether on the state's health care woes, the environment, higher education or assorted protests, dwindled. At that point I cut my subscription down to 2 days a week, Wednesdays and Sundays, opting to read The Financial Times online the other days.

Now, that appears to have perhaps been what many others did as well, given The Post now has its "marching orders" to cut the original 250 plus staff to 75  by July 1st.  More humiliating, the remaining core staff has had to move out of its original Denver News bldg. in downtown Denver, to a nondescript,  industrial building in Aurora.  

What hastened the paper's demise? The most immediate reason was that it allowed itself to be purchased by a hedge fund (Alden Global Capital of NYC) and thus was answerable to its shareholders.  As their pickings grew ever more slim, they began to demand the paper make severe cuts.  But as we know, nothing of quality ever comes of cuts. As one wry journalist (Jimmy Cozier)  in Barbados once put it  : "So, you're really gonna cut my legs off at the ankles and expect me to challenge competitors in a 5 K?"

For this reason the Post editorial board issued a plea in its April 8 Perspective section:

"Denver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom. If Alden isn't willing to do good journalist here it should sell the Post to owners who will."

True, but please, just leave out Philip Anschutz - who owns the rag known as the COS Gazette.

Then there is liberal gadfly Jon Caldara who wrote "many conservatives can't  hide their delight, at the Post being put on a ventilator."

Adding:

"It reinforces our view that papers are dying because we consumers want actual balance in reporting and the market is responding."

Ah yes, the market.  As I noted in my book, The Elements of the Corporatocracy, the market  is an abstraction which embraces the dynamics and exchanges in a money culture, consumptive society. Its priorities are not always benign but are faithfully reflected in the movement of speculative  financial markets. In the end it is nothing to base a culture or civilization on. After all. "the market" may be all agog and favor more apps that keep the hoi polloi addicted to their smartphones, or more tawdry electronic trash to fill up homes and storage units.  The market can never be an arbiter of reliable information, and by extension hedge fund ownership of a newspaper can never ensure its survival.

In Caldara's newspaper universe, every piece that attempts to educate the public about climate change, global warming, is "balanced" by a piece that denies it - or attributes it to a "natural cause" like the Sun.   But as I also observed in my chapter on the media corporatocracy, it is a myth to believe left wing or liberal views dominate the press. I cited a 1997 Nation piece, which read:

""The truth is that genuinely left-wing views rarely get a hearing. Norman Solomon had this confirmed while trying to peddle his column, when editors told him 'We've got progressive views covered - we run Anthony Lewis'.  The same Anthony Lewis who has described himself as a 'pro-capitalist, middle of the road tepid centrist', who supported George Bush Sr.'s Gulf  War."

This also explains why  - until the resurgence of robust liberal magazines like ''The New Republic', so many "leftist" authors, writers, journalists (like Greg Palast, Robert Scheer and others) were forced to go to Larry Flynt's Hustler to get their work published   There simply wasn't a place for them in the regular, "vanilla"  mainstream news papers, because corporate boards rejected what they had to offer. (For more on this see Norman Solomon's and Jeff Cohen's text, 'Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News')

So I really don't know what planet Caldara inhabits but it's not the one I'm on where The Denver Post is more a centrist alternative to the extreme Right Colorado Springs Gazette.  The only other actual "left" paper, the COS Independent, is a weekly,  not a daily.  It is also of interest to note that, contrary to popular myths, even left blogs are struggling to sustain funding. See e.g.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/jeff-tiedrich/78748/even-if-you-cant-or-wont-donate-there-are-other-things-you-can-do-to-help-us-out

And wifey informed me last night that even at "liberal" MSNBC there's a push to have more "Never Trumpers" appear than actual liberals.

Caldara and his whining ilk also bemoan the lack of more conservative intellectual material, which kind of shows me he needs a pair of better glasses.  He's obviously missing the op-ed fare from the toadies of the American Enterprise Institute, Hudson Institute, Stanford's Hoover Institute  etc. 

Besides, there isn't any genuine intellectual fare on the conservative side anyway, at least since William F. Buckley died.  As NY Times columnist and Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman has noted in a recent column:

"As others have pointed out, the real problem here is that media organizations are looking for unicorns: serious, honest, conservative intellectuals with real influence. Forty or fifty years ago, such people did exist. But now they don’t. To understand why, let me talk about what I know: the field of economics. This happens to be a field with a relatively strong conservative presence compared to other social sciences, and as far as I can tell even contains considerably more self-identified conservatives/Republicans than hard science. Even so, trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task, for two reasons.

First, while there are many conservative economists with appointments at top universities, publications in top journals, and so on, they have no influence on conservative policymaking. What the right wants are charlatans and cranks, in (conservative) Greg Mankiw’s famous phrase. If they use actual economists, they use them the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

The second problem with conservative economic thought is that even aside from its complete lack of policy influence, it’s in an advanced state of both intellectual and moral decadence – something that has been obvious for a while, but became utterly clear after the 2008 crisis."

And I have certainly given examples of this decadence in critiques of assorted  conservo  economists from time to time, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2018/03/americas-debt-disease-prof-marty.html

The ironic aspect of Caldara's rant is that even he admits in the end it is better to have a Denver Post paper than to be without one, i.e.

"From my point of view battling ever expanding government, we have a better chance slowing it down with a vibrant, even if liberal, paper in town."

He's partly right - but the D. Post still isn't a "liberal paper".   It's a centrist leaning paper - especially if you read its editorials, which features some liberal content - mainly in letters to the editor.

See also:

Denver Post Rebels Against Its Hedge-Fund Ownership - The New ...

'Best Of Enemies' Gets Two Thumbs Up From Me

Scene from 'Best of Enemies' with William F. Buckley (left) squaring off against Gore Vidal.


Hard core, political movies are rare in the American cinema scene. I really can't recall the last one I've seen, apart from 'Malcolm X', but that was more a docudrama and not a film based on a real life, real time clash of political opposites (though yes, some archival footage was clipped into it).  So it is with lots of fanfare that a new film has gained attention, 'The Best of Enemies' based on a series of 1968 televised face-offs between William F. Buckley - gadfly of all things liberal - and Gore Vidal, crusader against knuckle-dragging conservatives in all their various forms.

If ever there were two arch-ideological enemies they were William F. Buckley - perhaps the conservative movement's most influential voice, and Gore Vidal, brash and unapologetic voice for real liberals. In 1968, the ABC network, dead last behind CBS and NBC, didn’t have the resources for the kind of  Chicago Democratic convention coverage that their competitors did. So, ABC decided to let the flamboyant, unapologetic Vidal and Buckley – debate the issues of the day. Point-counterpoint. It was a novel idea at the time for television news.

It was also brilliant, and conniving: Once asked if there was anybody he would never take a stage with, Buckley had said he’d refuse to go up with a Communist, or Gore Vidal.  In the words of Christopher Hitchens:“There was nothing feigned about the mutual antipathy. They really did despise each other.”

Vidal prepared for the debates by actually hiring researchers to go over Buckley’s record and his writings; he wanted to destroy the man, in part because he knew that Buckley, possibly the greatest debater of his time, wanted to destroy him.  This was obvious to any political junkie who watched their altercations on the small screen (at the time on ABC) or who has the chance to watch them now, in this new movie.

Long before the movie, 'Best of Enemies',  The Buckley-Vidal debates made for great television, as the two started spitting barely veiled invective at one another, like two King Cobras locked in a mortal battle for supremacy.  "El Libtard" vs. Reptile Reeptard, what more could you want? The debates took on the tenor of a 10 -round prize fight.  But would there be blows below the belt? As it happened, yeah!

Chris Hitchens first called attention to  “the cherry bomb that’s waiting to go off – and finally does”: On the night of the penultimate debate, Vidal, who’d been trying to get under Buckley’s skin the whole time, finally called his opponent a “crypto-Nazi.” Upon which Buckley called him a “queer” and threatened to “sock” him “in the goddamned mouth.” (For more background check out Jim Holt’s excellent article about the debates, published in New York Magazine.)

At that point, the battle of ideologies mutated into bitter, vitriolic personal confrontation - and Buckley started it by attacking Vidal's sexual orientation when the appropriate and proportional response was to refer to Vidal as a" crypto-Communist".  But Buckley lacked the degree of noblesse oblige necessary to carry this out, revealing that beneath the patrician exterior he was an Irish street brawler at heart.

It quickly became clear that Vidal and Buckley weren’t really locking horns over individual issues, nor were they arguing two different political philosophies, as Liberal facing off vs. generic Reeptardo might today.  No, they were clashing over something much more existential. Both men were despondent about the state of the country, but in opposite ways. Vidal saw in the degradation and chaos around him the signs of  metastasizing national security state power in tandem with corporate ascendance.  Not surprising given that JFK's assassination five years earlier, as well as Bobby's in June of '68, were likely orchestrated by elements of the national security state.

So Vidal welcomed an imminent revolution to return power to people; meanwhile, Buckley saw a rapidly decaying social order that threatened to ruin everything he held dear. Each man’s very being outraged the other. “Their confrontation is about lifestyle,” we’re told. “What kind of people should we be? Their real argument, in front of the public, is who is the better person?”

Let's concede here that Gordon and Neville’s film is slick, but not in a shallow way. Not at all. The key is that they’re generous with their archival footage, as well as underlining and undercutting with wit and verve. At one point, a discussion of Buckley’s morality cuts to footage of him caddishly answering a young female questioner about mini-skirts, then cuts to reveal what he’s up to on a stage with Woody Allen.

For anyone like me who actually lived during the 60s, and knew about these two guys, the best footage was of the actual telecasts themselves. One only had to hear Vidal say the words, “William Buckley, the distinguished thinker” with all the lilting, sing-song contempt of a playground taunt, to know it was  'Game on' and it was gonna be ugly.

 Then to hear Buckley talk about Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge with snide dismissal, including his rolling eyes. The drama is all there, and it’s riveting, just as much now as it was when seen for the first time during the Chicago convention in August, 1968.(I had just moved into a much more spacious apt. In New Orleans' Garden District, and could now afford a new TV as well as stereo record player - which ok, featured mostly 60s anti-war classics from Dylan, Joan Baez and others)

The best part of the film without a doubt is all that archival footage traversing decades, the talking heads, the voiceovers, the debates themselves – it could have easily become an incoherent mishmash of editing.  But the idea of building the film around the telecasts, then using that structure to hop around in Buckley and Vidal’s past and future, conferred both immediacy and resonance with the current political epoch. Everything else becomes a flashback or a flash-forward from the turbulent present tense of 1968, the country’s past and future all aswirl around these two men hammering away at the very idea of America.

Let's agree that 'Best of Enemies’ true aim is to lament a bygone era of no holds barred political discourse. Vidal and Buckley may have started off as representatives of an old-fashioned school of debate, learned and articulate and polite, but by the end of the conventions they wound up inventing a new media landscape of constant conflict, sustained anger, and barely contained violence. Gordon and Neville find in these two men’s infamous clash a turning point, the moment in time when the networks, the press, the pundits, and even average Americans got into political blood sports.

We're at it as viciously as ever today and the Left and Right would now likely make both these guys wince with their pugnacious discourse.

See also:

http://www.salon.com/2015/08/02/this_is_how_the_clowns_took_over_the_sad_history_leading_to_the_spectacle_of_a_fox_news_debate_starring_front_runner_donald_trump/