Reply #22: My vision

[Squeech]

What I'd like to see is exactly what the wingnuts imagine the New York Times is: accurate reportage, a liberal editorial slant, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

It's so far from the reality that I'm not even sure I can describe it convincingly. What power there is in a paper like the Times is not only to decide what slant to put on a story (the administration gets its wording in the headline, the Democrats' response appears in paragraph 17 on the jump page) but even more to decide which stories are newsworthy. Note how they never dealt with the Downing Street Memo, first because it was thinly sourced, and when it was later confirmed because by then it was old news. Catch 22 much?

So I want a newspaper that will actively seek out news about things like the Downing Street Memo. I want a respectable-looking gray non-hippie broadsheet to run Robert Kennedy's followup article to his Rolling Stone piece. I want to read on the printed page that when Iraqi civilians are abducted by persons unknown, wearing police uniforms and carrying police weapons and using police vehicles, that it's not unreasonable to assume that the perps are in fact the Iraqi police. I want a regular newspaper to point out, every time there's a workplace accident like a mine disaster, who runs the responsible regulatory agency and what his previous allegiances are, and how far oversight and enforcement have sunk.

Somebody pointed out that every newspaper in the country has a section called Business, but not one called Labor. I'd like a newspaper to address that, to at least not pretend that corporations simply have to lay off people and outsource jobs in order to compete, while still paying obscene salaries and benefits to their CEOs.

What I envision might well be the exact opposite of the Washington Times, which Sun Myung Moon runs, at a huge loss, counted so far in the billions, but it's worth it to him because it gets his wackjob ideas into the public discourse. We should do that too, and maybe we can't afford billions like he can, but maybe we constitute a readership that might support an anti-Bushit newspaper. If we really are a free market economy with entrepreneurs actively seeking underserved markets, then this seems like it'd be an obvious opportunity for one such. Where is it? (Is it on line, masquerading as DU and DailyKos? I think we need it on dead trees-- the "marketplace of ideas" seems to require it.)