The Times' Days Are Numbered.

Let's return to one of my favorite recurring topics here on this blog, the slow death of The Washington Times. It's been nine months since I last talked about it, folks, so deal with it.

Back in November, there was a shakeup there, and the Unification Church, which has subsidized the paper since day one, pulled its funding, and it was put up for sale a few months ago. So they decided to change things a little bit. So at the beginning of this year, they essentially became a Washington DC paper in name only. Gone are the Metro and Sports sections. Instead, we have two sections, one of news and one of commentary. Its brief flirtation with respectability is long gone, and the news is now just as biased as the editorial section.

Since I was at loose ends this evening, I picked up a copy and went to Burger King. In the past few weeks, the paper has been printed on paper that is a full inch narrower than the Washington Post. The ten-page news section is pretty much poorly-written run-of-the-mill news, but every single article biased to the right. The "Commentary" section is twenty pages. The first five pages are of opinion (including the editorials and the letters page which consists of about four letters, most of which are from outside the DC area). Then we have one page of "Fun & Games", which consists of two comic strips, two comic panels, a pathetically easy crossword, a Sudoku puzzle, Dear Abby, and the same horoscope as in the Post. One page contains the weather map. Then we have fourteen pages of classified ads.

Yes, folks, that's right. Nearly half of the paper consists of classified ads. They can hardly get any ads in the rest of the paper, but they have fourteen pages of classified ads. Go figure.

And with this new direction, they also doubled their price and reduced their circulation. You now pay a buck for this. And two times a week, I pay perfectly good money for this so I have something to read at a fast food place so I have an excuse not to go home at night.

I will still state that in spite of all of this, I really don't have a problem with their right to exist. I just think it is funny that a conservative newspaper is struggling to stay in business after being run on handouts for nearly thirty years. Aren't a free market and survival of the fittest two building blocks of the conservative viewpoint? If this newspaper was subject to this rather than being run as a charity since 1982, it would have folded a long time ago.

So now that they are attempting to run it as a real business, let's see how much longer it will last.

Eric Out!