'Dear Reader, The Editor Hates Your F—ing Guts'

When John Podhoretz linked on Twitter tonight to a pissy rant from Dave Perry, editor of Colorado’s Aurora Sentinel blaming the readers on the downsizing woes of crosstown frenemies the Denver Post, I was all set to type up a post fisking Perry’s article. It’s titled, “The Denver Post stumbles, but sneering will land you on your own face” — the author not realizing that his headline is the very definition of projection, as Perry’s sneers have very much caused him to crash proboscis first into the mud and then step repeatedly on a rake, to only slightly mix metaphors.

But when Googling for more about Perry’s byline, I discovered that Erick Erickson of Red State already crafted an excellent response.  As Erick writes, “what seems pretty clear from Dave Perry’s column on the downsizing is that the reason the Denver Post is failing is because so much of the printed press hates its readers and think they are indispensable:”

Just check out [Perry’s] concluding paragraph:

So sneer all you want about the misfortunes of the Post and our industry. But I promise you that without it, Denver, and Aurora, and all of Colorado, will be a far lesser place than it is. I very often don’t agree with many news and non-news decisions the Post makes, but I have no hesitation in insisting that the mission and product of the Denver Post — and the Colorado Springs Gazette, and the Durango Herald and the Aurora Sentinel — is critical to the region’s well-being and success. In any way you can, you should support the Post and other media, and tell them what you like and hate. But if you dismiss them, and all of us, you dismiss the only real defense society has against everything you spend so much time complaining about — that matters.

Got that? The existence of the Denver Post “is critical to the region’s well-being and success.”

Now knell before Dave you stupid readers.

This is the problem with a lot of the dinosaurs of the media. They value themselves and think you must, not should, as well. Not only that, but they have decided they are the arbiters of truth and but for them bad things will happen, truths will not be told, and cat listicles will reign supreme.

They refuse to adapt, refuse to change, and as the world changes around them they decide it is you, not them, that is the problem.

In 1992, the late Ginny Carroll, a bureau chief for the then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek, publicly admitted without a jot of shame on C-SPAN that during that year’s Republican Convention, she wore a button that announced to her magazine’s current and potential readers, “Yeah, I’m with the Media — Screw You.”

Nearly a quarter century and millions of alienated and departed subscribers later, and even as they continue to implode further, the DNC-MSM just can’t get the basic message that sneering at your customers does not make them eager to return for more of the same abuse.