Michael Malone call this an 'Obituary for Obituaries', but it's not; it's an obit for an industry. The payload:
...newspapers (and even more obviously, troubled national newsmagazines like Newsweek) have essentially abandoned the news business and gone into the comfort business. In other words, they have a pretty good idea now just who constitutes the heart of their loyal readership, and they write for that group, with the intent of either delivering news that fits their world view or sanitizing bad news that does not. And, since there is no way that they can deliver that information in a timely way – they assume that their readers have already learned from the Web about important events – now it is the paper’s job to reduce any discomfort or cognitive dissonance by contextualize the story into the tribe’s existing prejudices and self-image.Hmmm, I seem to have mumbled something like that in the past:
Only in the case where the buyer is aligned [with bias] and not searching for ground truth will an increase in value result.... We have just reinvented the party organ newspaper. We might also have invented a way to salvage a decaying legacy business by guiding it into a stable, but ideologically defined niche.Michael does have senior toldyahso rights, both by date and tenure in the business.