At the start of February, I wrote:

So far the Blogosphere has spotted Chernobyl-style meltdowns in credibility by CBS, the Washington Post, Newsweek, AP, and on numerous occasions, the New York Times and Reuters.

When I interviewed Glenn Reynolds last year for my TCS Daily article on An Army Of Davids, he quoted a passage from Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End that "utopia was a Red Queen’s Race with extinction". Glenn added, "Even if things are going terribly, it will seem like it’s going well, right up until the end".

Have the mainstream media quietly begun some sort of Red Queen's Race of their own? Or is the Blogosphere merely getting increasingly better at catching the media's worst moments and publicizing them? By and large, I believe the general public has come to believe that the vast majority of old media outlets lean to the left, despite the exponentially diminishing claims of objectivity. And since half the country does as well, newspapers and television have a wide audience to aim their content. So does that mean that Blogosphere complaints about the MSM are being read as mere partisan sniping?

Robert Kuttner of liberal house organs Columbia Journalism Review and The American Prospect (and Mickey Kaus's bete noire) confirms my diagnosis:

By the usual indicators, daily newspapers are in a deepening downward spiral. The new year brought reports of more newsroom layoffs, dwindling print circulation, flat or declining ad sales, increasing defections of readers and advertisers to the Internet, and sullen investors. Wall Street so undervalues traditional publishing that McClatchy’s stock price briefly rose when it sold off the Minneapolis Star Tribune at a fire-sale price, mainly for the $160 million tax benefit. As succeeding generations grow up with the Web and lose the habit of reading print, it seems improbable that newspapers can survive with a cost structure at least 50 percent higher than their nimbler and cheaper Internet competitors. (“No trucks, no trees,” says the former Boston Globe publisher Ben Taylor.) The dire future predicted by the now-classic video, EPIC 2014, in which Google, Amazon, and an army of amateurs eventually drive out even The New York Times, begins to feel like a real risk.

Near the end of my post, I wrote:

The media as a whole aren't going away any time soon, of course (although Hugh Hewitt might argue with that). They're too well funded via advertising, subscriptions, stocks, bonds, and other revenue. But it seems like something has to change--the accumulated weight of all of the errors, gaffes, and uses of wildly slanted tone in otherwise "objective" reporting has to begin to register at some point.

What will change amongst journalists? Kuttner presents some surprisingly upbeat scenarios, some of which involve newspapers going intensely local, as other journalists have also long suggested. Kuttner concludes:

Assuming that most dailies survive the transition, my guess is that in twenty-five years they will be mostly digital; that even people like me of the pre-Internet generation will be largely won over by ingenious devices like Times Reader, supplemented by news alerts, rss feeds, and God knows what else. But whether newspapers are print or Web matters far less than whether they maintain their historic calling.

Yes--their traditional historic calling as competing highly-partisan sources, before the mid-to-late 20th century period of media consolidation began, bringing with it not just an overall tone of liberal bias, but perhaps even worse, a deadily uniform dullness, as well.

(Via Hugh Hewitt, who has some thoughts on the Strib's latest gaffe.)