Salon founder David Talbot’s review of Eric Alterman’s media book is the clearest indication I’ve seen that Salon is indeed going down the tubes this time. I’ve been predicting their imminent demise for a while now, reasoning that an enterprise that’s blown 80 million investor dollars and continues to lose money while living in pricey corporate digs and carrying an overhead that would make an oil sheik blush can’t be long for this world, but they’ve managed to stay comatose but alive thanks to donations from misguided rich guys like John Warnock.
The first sign that the donors aren’t coming through was the combative weblog post by Scott Rosenberg blasting Salon’s critics in the financial press, but this latest diatribe of Talbot’s really seals the deal for me. It’s a bitter, warped, and combative assault on the so-called conservative-dominated media, highlighting conservative dominance of small-market media such as radio and cable news, while ignoring the liberal bastions in the much larger and more influential broadcast TV news and newspapers. He can’t ignore broadcast TV completely, of course, so he lets us in on the secrets that Cokie Roberts and George Stephanopoulos are secret tools of the VRWC, which is proved because ABC didn’t summarily fire token conservative George Will when Stephanopoulos took over the anchor’s chair of ABC’s lackluster This Week show a few weeks ago. The facts that Stephanopoulos is a veteran of the Clinton White House who left after tiring of Slick Willie’s constant lying to his own press staff or that Cokie Roberts’ mom and dad were Lindy and Hale Boggs, among the most powerful Congressional Democrats of their era, are insignificant in this analysis, of course, as is the fact that the New York Times has been relentlessly Anti-Bush since Florida and more shrill every day.
Talbot’s subtext is that Salon was forced out by a right-wing conspiracy so powerful it tells liberals what to watch, read, and hear, and not because of his inability to watch the bottom line or put out a credible story amidst his soft porn and infotainment occasionally.
If it was competition that drove Salon to the brink, it clearly wasn’t competition from the right. There are still plenty of hard core Democrats and Greens who aren’t buying what Fox News is selling, and they’re not all welfare queens and crack heads. A more plausible story is that Salon’s competition is the New York Times, a publication with a strong on-line presence and an ideology, under Howell Raines, that’s indistinguishable from Salon from page 1 to the news to the Op-Eds. Left-wing partisan hacks can fill their bellies and their heads with more free on-line fare from the Times in a day than Salon offers in a month, and still have money left over to buy their porn at the news stand. Talbot’s niche has been taken over by better journalists, better marketers, and better thinkers, and all his whining about Murdoch and Scaife’s conspiracies doesn’t change the facts.
Talbot’s out-of-touch with his own readers, and no publisher who suffers from that condition can long survive.
UPDATE: Foreign devil Tim Blair has some observations on Mr. Talbot as well.
A FOAF told me that someone told him and/or her that a well-known high-tech incubator in the southwest quadrant of the U.S. has “tax write-off” projects. Maybe that’s what Warnock is after, or perhaps it’s considered a charitable contribution under some IRS rule or another.
Perhaps Salon could be saved if the government would help promote it, as a way of leveling out the playing field, VRWC and all.
I for one will be glad to see Salon gone. The signal/noise ratio over there is attrocious. Whatever was once good about it has been lost.
Right on about the New York Times. It’s Salon with better writers and editors and content.
“I’ve been predicting their imminent demise for a while now…”
Uh, how imminent and for how long?
Great Site