Newspapers Are Dying, Blog At 11

The New Yorker is running a long and thoughtful piece by Eric Alterman on the death and life of the American newspaper. It's not news that newspapers are dying, but the acceleration of the process in the last few years is startling: "Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years... The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies' solution to their problem was to make 'our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.'" The article goes on to profile The Huffington Post as exemplar of what is replacing paper and ink. "The Huffington Post's editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the 'mullet strategy.' ('Business up front, party in the back' is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) 'User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,' Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to 'argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp.

Comments

Re:Ha Ha

[ArcherB]

This condescending dick thinks that people want to live in mud huts and get their drinking water from the same watering hole they shit in. People who invite development projects do not necessarily welcome military action. Sometimes it is necessary when your engineers and construction workers are getting shot at.

He'd be asking why we were not in Afghanistan sooner to make sure that all those "brown" women could go to school, not have their clits cut off and be allowed to show ankle skin in public. Female genital mutilation does not occur in Afghanistan. OK, what about the schools, the full body burkas and the right to walk in public without a relative male? Do women's rights end at genital mutilation?

Do you have evidence of mass starvation in Syria? There are loads of tourists there these days, and no one is reporting famine and misery. As a matter of fact, I do:
1,200,000 STARVING IN SYRIA.; Rev. W.H. Hall Says 1,000 a Day Are Dying in Lebanon Mountains.

Your post deserves to get modded down because it is poorly thought out. You could make a case that America is doing good in many parts of the world, but when you should such shoddy arguments you hurt your own cause. The post I was responding to said the following:

Uhm.. you do realize that the U.S. is in practically every country in the world, throwing its weight around, killing off brown people at a horrendous rate, destabilizing governments and economies, and threatening nuclear war with its biggest peers?

I'd say that maybe America is to blame for a lot more than it'd like to admit. You bypassed THAT post to tell me that MINE had shoddy arguments?

Re:Ha Ha

[ArcherB]

Pathetic - take some personal responsibility for the disaster you've created in Iraq. Pretending that you did good there is nothing but moral cowardice - rather than admitting to yourself that you've been supporting a criminal act and start working to remedy the situation, you go with the easy option and just deny the facts. Disaster? We found mass graves filled with women and children. We found the remains of mothers, still holding their toddler kids. The mother had a bullet hole in her head. The toddler was buried alive!

We know that entire villages were gassed, with 99.9% of their populations exterminated. Real world REAL LIFE GENOCIDE. And you call the US action to stop such atrocities a disaster. You call in criminal? I'm sorry, but criminal is standing aside and doing nothing while innocent men, women and children are butchered. What the UN did in the 90's toward Iraq and Rwanda and what they are doing today in Darfur is criminal.

You speak of facts! Look up how many children died due the UN's Oil for Food Program. I'll give you a hint, UNICEF has them. Compare those numbers to the total number that have died since the US led invasion of Iraq. Go ahead, look at the raw REAL numbers before you start accusing ME of denying facts. Until then, you are lying your ass off and you are well aware of it. You stand there and call me a coward while you watch good, innocent men, women and children die and all you want to do is talk and place blame. I signed up. I went there to fight for these people who can not fight for themselves. Be glad you are behind a keyboard coward, because in real life, those are the kind of words that end up being your last.

You want to prove you are not a coward? Go to Iraq yourself. Find a father who is walking his little girl to school and tell him that what he is doing is the result of a criminal act. Try to tell him that he was better off before we got there. Go to a polling place and find some old lady with a purple finger and call her a criminal. Tell her she shouldn't have the right to vote. Something tells me you'll learn first hand what a criminal act is all about. Go tell the husband and father of one of those families found in a mass grave and tell him how you wish that Saddam Hussein was still in power and removing him was cowardly, criminal act. Tell him how you wish we would have just let him and others like him die.

Re:Ha Ha

[ArcherB]

You seem to think that we went into Iraq carpet bombing cities. Nothing can be further from the truth. I'm afraid you have been misled and you are passing on those lies...er... misinformation yourself.

How did you find them - digging up the ground to make space for the children you killed with cluster bombs? Show me a village, city or town where cluster bombs were used. You can't because we didn't. Cluster bombs were only used in open desert against military formations, and used sparingly at that.

The UN isn't a political entity, it's a debating forum and with an organization entirely controlled by the security council. What it does reflects the agreement of the security council's members, the US being the most powerful of them. The UN has a military force made up of its members. They usually use "local" military forces where UN military action is needed. The UN was formed to prevent genocide and atrocities like those committed during WWII. They failed that mandate in Rwanda and even admitted failure. UN military forces (the blue helmets) stood by and watched hundreds of thousands get butchered and did nothing. Just like they did in Darfur, just like they did in Iraq, just like they did in Afghanistan, just like they are doing in Tibet and just like they will continue to do around the world. If the UN could act as the world's police force, I would welcome them to that role. Unfortunately, they have a record of putting human rights abusers on the "human rights council" and has failed repeatedly.

No sorry, if you want me to debate your numbers, you need to have some first. OK, that's easy enough.

Its report, compiled with the co-operation of Iraq, is the first survey of child and maternal mortality since the end of the Gulf War in 1991.

In what it describes as an "ongoing humanitarian emergency", it shows a dramatic rise in child mortality rates in central and southern Iraq - areas controlled by Baghdad.

Unicef estimates that over the last 10 years at least 500,000 child deaths could have been prevented. That's 500,000 deaths due to Saddam Hussein and the UN oil for food program. These are just children's deaths. These do NOT include those that were killed actively by Saddam Hussein. These do NOT include the mass graves or those that were tortured to death in prison.
The US led invasion of Iraq has NOT killed more than 500,000 people.

There are your numbers. Since you were too lazy to retrieve them yourselves, I did it for you. These numbers plainly show that we have actually saved lives by invading Iraq.

Ask her if she'd prefer her grandchildren were still alive, or if she prefers her ability to vote for a government which can only stay in power as long as the US occupation troops supports it. Most of the grandmothers I met were too busy thanking me for saving their grandchildren for me to ask them anything.

Did you go and apologize to the families of the ~100,000 Iraqi's *you* killed? I killed exactly ZERO. Even if I had killed 100,000, I would gladly accept the the thank you from the 1,000,000 parents whose children did not die from preventable diseases. You see, using your own numbers, 100,000 Iraqi adults is less than 500,000 kids.