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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Tim Eyman cheers the end of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's print edition

What is Tim Eyman doing in a news story about the final print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the city's oldest business?
Initiative activist Tim Eyman said the P-I's last print edition is one of the "biggest nonevents I've seen in a long time."

Something will rise in the P-I's place, he said.

"It is richly ironic that all the liberal policies they've advocated all these years have come home to roost and contributed to them going out of business," Eyman said.
(Memo to the staff at the Everett Herald: Just because Tim Eyman sends out an email doesn't mean you have to quote from it.)

So let's get this straight. Tim Eyman thinks that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's opposition to his beloved right wing agenda, and perhaps his initiatives, is partly to blame for Heart's decision to stop printing the paper.

That makes perfect sense. After all, it's not like the people of Seattle and King County, the primary market for the Post-Intelligencer, have consistently opposed Tim Eyman's schemes, voting them down in large numbers. It's not like they're liberal or have a habit of voting for Democrats.

Oh, wait... never mind. What's afflicting the newspaper industry has nothing to do with political ideology. Most conservatives know this, but for some reason many of them seem to derive satisfaction from living in their own fantasy world.

Perhaps they can explain to me why the King County Journal, owned by the conservative Horvitz family, was shut down a couple years ago.

That paper ran reactionary editorials all the time. It gave John Carlson column space. It was one of like two papers of significance to endorse Initiative 933 (the other, as I recall, was the Centralia Chronicle). Why isn't it still here?

People clearly think the end of the Post-Intelligencer as a newspaper is significant, or they wouldn't be snapping up today's final edition like crazy.

I surveyed a number of coffee shops, grocery stores, and other businesses in Redmond this afternoon, just to see if I could find a P-I. I couldn't. There wasn't one copy to found anywhere. There are still copies of the Seattle Times, USA Today, and New York Times, but there are no P-Is. People want that last edition because the Seattle Post-Intelligencer means something to them.

It is richly ironic that Tim Eyman is dismissing the end of the Seattle P-I's print edition as a big nonevent - not because most people in the region disagree with him, but because Eyman owes his success to institutions like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that have given him press and run his columns.

Increasingly, there are fewer and fewer reporters left in Olympia for Tim to pelt with emails and phone calls, and to bother in person when he's at the state capital. There are less op-ed pages where he can send his recycled propaganda. There's less space in newspapers for stories about his latest ill-conceived idea.

All of this is simply a consequence of what is happening to the newspaper industry. The media landscape is changing as institutions that have dutifully decided and reported what's news close up shop or become shadows of their former selves. Journalists everywhere are losing their jobs. If Tim Eyman truly thinks that's good news for him or for any of us, he is sorely mistaken.

Comments:

Blogger Watchout5 said...

"all the liberal policies they've advocated all these years have come home to roost and contributed to them going out of business"

Yes because it's liberalism, not technological advances that make them all completely irrelevant, that killed the newspaper. If only they would have endorsed Dino Rossi would they have been spared.

I don't disagree that it's pretty much a nonevent, I think it's incredibly irrelevant to care about newspapers in a world where I can video conference millions of people around the world instantly. Eyman is even more of a moron than I once thought if he actually believes newspapers are dying because they're 'too liberal'.

March 18, 2009 1:10 PM  

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