Inbreeding Among Royals, Pitbulls, and Editors

Why are American newspapers in decline, the circulation plummeting, their reputations in tatters, and their editorial decisions the subject of denunciation?

The decision by New York Times and Los Angeles Times to publish on June 23 the details of the Swift program --details which in the opinion of most serious counterterrorism experts, will help terrorists elude capture—is only the most recent of a long series of press catastrophes that dog the print industry. Disgust at that decision was at least in part cumulative, a widely shared shudder at the self-proclaimed importance of the media generally and the big newspapers specifically. The little people just aren’t buying it anymore –both figuratively and literally, if whispers of the Los Angeles Times’ circulation numbers are to be believed.

There are plenty of pieces denouncing the MSM elites, and I have written my share.

But few try and figure out what went wrong. I visited Columbia School of Journalism in the fall to probe, and came away with some answers written up in the Weekly Standard.

That investigation looked at the future of MSM, not at its present. How did the big papers go off the rails? After the repeated attempts by New York Times’ editor Bill Keller and Los Angeles Times’ editor Dean Baquet to ex plain themselves only dug their collective hole deeper, it began to become obvious that the collapse of media credibility generally, and of the big papers specifically, has to do with a crisis of leadership.

The papers don’t have any. Or rather, that which they have is weak: weak minded and weak willed, prone to aggressiveness followed by obsequiousness. Erratic. Impulsive and self-destructive.

Where does such leadership come from? An examination of the leadership lineage of the four major dailies that are widely and correctly understood to be very left of center in this country –the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times—reveals that much of the dysfunction of these newsrooms may fairly be traced to inbreeding among their elites.