Beacon Street Journal

The Washington Times reports that Senator John Kerry is concerned about the plight of the newspaper industry, particularly his hometown paper, The Boston Globe.

Troubled by the possible shuttering of his hometown paper, Sen. John Kerry reached out to the Boston Globe on Tuesday, then called for Senate hearings to address the woes of the nation’s print media…

“America’s newspapers are struggling to survive, and while there will be serious consequences in terms of the lives and financial security of the employees involved, including hundreds at the Globe, there will also be serious consequences for our democracy where diversity of opinion and strong debate are paramount,” Mr. Kerry said.

Kerry’s calls for hearings on the woes of the newspaper industry will prove to be as ineffectual as his call for hearings on piracy after the fact of the recent successful rescue mission of American captain Richard Phillips. Democratic politicians like John Kerry are in a panic because with the inevitable collapse of big city broadsheet publications they lose one of their most steadfast and reliable media allies. This helps explain why, to date, no prominent Republican politicians have come forward to save journalistic institutions that they realize have long been unapologetic house communication organs for the Democratic Party.

Kerry’s letter to the Globe was rife with irony. He cited the negative influence of “agenda-driven reporting” and media conglomerates. Was Kerry speaking in jest? The Boston Globe, like it’s corporate parent,The New York Times, both have long been consummate practitioners of agenda journalism.

Kerry’s letter to the Globe contains all the by now familiar, self-serving and self-important pleas by journalists to save the newspaper industry. I’ve addressed the fallacies of some of these arguments previously here. Suffice it to say that democracy will survive intact without the self-anointed guardians of our liberties. So please, spare as the wailing about the indispensability of newspapers to the survival of democracy.

The Boston Globe is slated to lose $85 million this year and it’s parent company, the New York Times, has threatened to close the publication unless unions agree to $20 million in concessions. But, this alone may not even save the Globe. With The New York Times itself tottering on the brink of insolvency, the future for The Boston Globe looks bleak indeed. Even if it continues as an on-line publication only, there is insufficient classified and retail advertising revenue to sustain its existing web site in its current form, and what will remain will be a substantially pared down version.

Reflexively and insufferably liberal, the editorial and reporting repertoire of the Globe has long been dominated by a stifling political correctness and love of multiculturalism. For decades, the Boston Globe exhibited nothing but contempt for the middle-class value system of a large swath of its existing and potential readership. Wouldn’t it then be one of the ironies of journalism in Boston if it were the scrappy blue-collar Boston Herald that emerges out of the Darwinian struggle wracking the industry as the survivor instead of the patrician and insufferably liberal Boston Globe?