Posted by
BrianR on Thursday, July 06, 2006 10:20:29 AM
When I came to LA in 1974, there were two daily newspapers with major circulation: the LA Times and the Daily News and Greensheet (which later became the LA Daily News).
At the time they had distinct and opposing editorial positions. The Times was (and remains) liberal. This was the era when the Soviet Union still existed, and a lot of people referred to it as Pravda West. The Daily News was a distinctly conservative voice.
I used to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the Times because I was young and still hadn’t developed the kind of resume that appealed to headhunters. I was always looking for a better job, and the Sunday Times’ classifieds were simply without peer.
However, I subscribed to the Daily News for my daily news. I did so for over twenty years.
Then a funny thing happened, right around the time of the 2000 elections. The Daily News started to change. I noticed it first in the Letters to the Editor section. More and more of the letters were from liberals. Then the paper started taking stances that at best could be called fence-straddling. Then they endorsed gun control proposals (a huge hot button for me), and finally endorsed Kerry for President in 2004.
I went ballistic and cancelled my subscription.
Now they’re endorsing the Senate version of immigration reform – the No Illegal Alien Left Behind Act.
They have, essentially, turned into the LA Times Lite.
Why this has happened one can only guess. Scrambling for market share in a medium that’s losing ground in general to alternatives such as talk radio and the Internet? The desire to be “taken seriously” by their peers in the press and the intelligentsia?
All I know is that they’ve turned into just another liberal fish-wrap. Too bad.