Can You Have Your Head in the Sand With One Eye Looking Out?

Big media self-flagellation is a great thing to see. It's a bit more in vogue since Katrina, the story where the news media finally quit being a (face down) lap dog for W and decided to start asking some questions of our government.

L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten regularly covers media issues and wrote a column (note that you may need to do a free sign-up to access LA Times content--I've found it pretty much spam free) about how the media covered the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I won't go on about Ms. Smith, other to say that when made up and photographed she was smokin' hot (when her weight was less than the average college offensive lineman) and the comparisons to Marilyn Monroe are ridiculous. Then again, my celebrity radar can be way off, given that I couldn't believe that so many people gave a shit about OJ Simpson. But, I digress.

Rutten's argument is that newspapers should be immune to public opinion and that for their survival they should choose between feeding its readers broccoli or ice cream. He claims that the ability to instantly measure the public's desire for a story via website hits is making the soft serve machines go into overdrive.

Newspapers have always been commercial ventures. For all of its great reporting [insert name of your favorite newspaper here] still had to sell Washington's Birthday white sale and classified ads. The Chandler family (who turned around the LA Times and made it into a real paper) was unapologetic boosters of any plan to grow LA so that it would have more subscribers for its advertisers. Maybe they don't have the same return as the condo development on the beach, but the owners have been happy to cede that for the power the paper gave them to shape public policy.

Where I disagree with Rutten is with the conjunction or. Why not and? If a page one story about Anna Nicole Smith gets at least some of the people reading about Iraq/Iran or some other topic that perhaps they should know about, where's the harm in printing them both? It's not like the LA Times doesn't have an entertainment section. Besides, higher readership might entice some local buyers to purchase it back from the Tribune Company of Chicago, who was the highest bidder.