Better Dead Than Read
Columbia Journalism Review has the oddest piece up right now. Let me give the first and last paragraphs:
On September 17, 1982, the newspaper guild of the Buffalo Courier-Express voted to do something no other media outlet in the U.S. had done or would do: It voted to turn down an offer from Rupert Murdoch’s News America Publishing Company to buy the failing Buffalo morning daily. The vote meant that Buffalo would be left with one newspaper, The Buffalo News. And it meant that the Courier-Express’s 1,100 employees would be out of a job. ...
History will write the final chapter on Rupert Murdoch, and will weigh his impact on journalism. But as his empire is shaken by this scandal, I can’t help but continue to believe that nearly thirty years ago, all of us that September night in Buffalo, New York did the right thing.
Got that? It's better that 1,100 employees lost their jobs and a town lost its second newspaper than that Rupert Murdoch would buy it.
And why are we celebrating this? Well, the deal was that the union didn't want the new owner to have a say in how the business was run. The union wanted all layoffs to come from the most recently hired, even if the worst deadbeat was the longest employed.
The hero of the piece even notes that he feels a bit bad because many of the journalists never worked again.
One commenter notes the silliness:
You made the world a worse place, you killed a lot of jobs, you eliminated competition and therefore the quality of journalism in your city, all explicitly in the name of maintaining sloth-protecting union work rules (“last hired, first fired.”)
But the important thing is you remain sanctimonious and self-righteous about it.
Good for you!
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Comments :
Jun '11
Re: Better Dead Than Read
Jan '11
Re: Better Dead Than Read
It's a thought piece with no thoughts, only reflexive mumbling.
Jun '10
Re: Better Dead Than Read
You can't let heretics run your ideological crusade...er, newspaper.
Jun '10
Re: Better Dead Than Read
Ha ha! I think the piece should end with the classic Greg Gutfeld line, "And if you support Rupert Murdoch, you are worse than Hitler."
Aug '10
Re: Better Dead Than Read
My mother used to described that sort of foolishness as "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
Sep '10
Re: Better Dead Than Read
It's not as if Murdoch is a committed ideologue--one of the reasons why his very popular British paper News of the World was so popular was that it never ran an editorial that didn't jibe with current British majority public opinion. Fox News, one of his U.S. ventures, uses a similar business model--give the majority the product they want. Because Fox News is not all liberal all the time, it mirrors the U.S.'s center-right orientation, which quite effectively challenges the long-held dominance of the U.S. liberal media. Now the libs are trying to bring him down, using this News of the World phone hacking show trial.
Dec '10
Re: Better Dead Than Read
At least it's good to know that the left still has its own suicidal tendencies.
Re: Better Dead Than Read
James Taranto at the WSJ has this comment: