"In 1978, You Could Afford To Be a Dull City Newspaper"

In his interview with John Hawkins, Mark Steyn has a great take on one of American newspapers’ (many) ills–their bland liberal corporate dullness:

Well, there are two answers to that: the first is that it’s true US newspapers are not exactly beating my door down. The second is that, when they do beat my door down, my loyal retainer sets the dogs on them and peppers their retreating posteriors with buckshot. I’ll explain that second part first. I appear in newspapers in a lot of different countries, and the sad fact is that, mainly as a consequence of local newspaper monopolies, US syndication fees represent some of the lowest publication rates in the world – that’s to say, to take one recent example, you’d earn more from a single reprint in a Fijian newspaper than one certain prominent US statewide daily was proposing to pay for my column for an entire year. The US syndication business is the publishing equivalent of vaudeville, and I don’t particularly see why it’s in my interests to fill up Gannett