Awwww, Puddin’

We know it’s not nice to rejoice in the misfortunes of others, but when the “others” are as annoyingly sanctimonious and consistently wrong-headed as the liberal editors of La Socialista (a.k.a. The State newspaper), a little grave-dancing is probably in order.

We wrote earlier this week about the financial difficulties facing South Carolina’s largest newspaper, and yesterday evening we received even more encouraging news regarding the paper’s plight.

From the blog of Unabomber look-alike and editorial page editor Brad Warthen, here’s the good news:

Starting today, The State will not have separate op-ed pages on Fridays and Mondays. This is a cost-saving measure, reducing our newsprint expenditure. Instead, we will frequently run a syndicated column on this page on Fridays, and a local guest column on the Monday letters page. We also invite readers to explore our offerings at thestate.com/opinion, and Brad Warthen’s Blog at blogs.thestate.com. — The Editors

This is a continuation of the painful recent cutbacks we’ve experienced in personnel and operational funds. As I’ve mentioned before, Mike Fitts’ departure brought the editorial staff down to less than half what I had at the start of this decade. Our elimination of Saturday pages earlier this year was a reflection of both the staff cutbacks — so few people can only do so much — and newsprint savings. This one is pretty much all about the newsprint.

You don’t like this? Well, guess what? I’m pretty sure I hate it a lot more than you do. All of us do. There’s nothing we can do about losing these pages, so we struggle constantly to figure out what we CAN do instead to keep serving readers.

And therein lies the rub … because La Socialista doesn’t really “serve readers,” it serves big government apologists and status quo sycophants whose policies are consistently holding South Carolina back. In fact, La Socialista serves these institutional forces so slavishly that they’ve become little more than a mouthpiece for the harshest negative attacks against people who are actually fighting to turn this state around.

Fortunately, the “marketplace of ideas” is beginning to make a long-overdue course correction.

Comments