Make it stop

By Media Farm

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Hey, have you heard about these gas prices? It's some crazy shit. Gas—get this—is expensive. Just ask the Herald. Aside from Turnpike workers who get paid $150,000 a year to sodomize disabled puppies, the cost of refined petroleum is all the paper talks about these days. The issue landed on the tabloid's cover twice last week. On consecutive days. It's enough to drive a bipolar politician to grope at strangers' crotches.

MEDIA FARM KNEW that this presidential election cycle felt miserable, but we couldn't understand why. What was it about watching the electorate dawdling around, weighing the prospect of rewarding a cocksure, near-messianic sense of entitlement against a surrender to craven opportunism, that has made us feel so dead inside?

Now we know. This thing isn't insufferable because it's insufferable. It's insufferable because Hunter S. Thompson isn't around anymore to make it, uh, sufferable. And who do we have to thank for that fact? None other than that pig-fucking imperialist George W. Bush! So says the Phoenix. So it might as well have come from the Pope. "On top of everything else they've blighted over their awful eight-year reign, the Bushies did this: they killed Hunter S. Thompson."

Sweet Jesus, what's a populace to do? Produce searing political commentary and dirty jokes for ourselves? Sit on the couch and watch I Love Money? Scour the country until we find one other person who can write, and worship at that person's feet? How about we just thrash around in the darkness, repeating "Thompson," "Thompson," "Thompson," until the word count machine says it's enough, and we can stop trying to say anything and just put the guy on the cover already?

The piece was the worst kind of bait and switch, because it promised to say something—anything would've done—and only delivered several thousand words of nothingness peppered with flecks of wishful thinking (the Doctor would've found the American Dream in Barack Obama's big, beautiful eyes) and tortured analysis (the Doctor could still shake the world in 2004, even though he was only filing his ESPN.com column every three months, because there weren't any blogs back in 2004; that shit might not have flown today). In the end, this place was "no longer a country for an old man like Thompson."

We'll take a lump of lead to the head now, please. Or maybe 37,000 words devoted to the socio-economic significance of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Anything. Please. Make it stop.

THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY is raising the cover price of its communist newsletter/flagship property, by 25 cents, to $1.50. The move comes not long after a similarly sized price increase for the Globe (one that the Herald roundly mocked, and then matched), and just days after analysts at Standard & Poor's warned that it might downgrade the Times Co.'s stock to junk status. The announcement came as the Times Co. admitted that its earnings were off by nearly 50 percent, that ad revenue in print and online was off 11.8 percent from a year ago, and that June's ads were down 17.8 percent—"a dismal showing," the Times reported, "yet better than average for the industry." We smell an optimistic new slogan. The New York Times: On average, we're less fucked than half our peers!

Also last week, Tribune Company CEO Sam Zell described his industry as being up against "some of the worst advertising numbers in the history of the world." Both the New York Observer and the Columbia Journalism Review took up the charge, with the Observer declaring that 2008 could be the worst year in the history of the modern newspaper business, and CJR retorting that, no, just maybe, there might have been five years when the industry stunk even more strongly of death than it does today.

They included 1957, when Gannett began corporatizing the industry; 1963, when New York's newspaper printers went on strike for four months and the world still managed to get its news; 1982, which marked the launch of USA Today; and 1999, which birthed a seven-toed demon named Craigslist.

And if that's as bad as we've ever had it before, then we're all in deep, deep trouble now.

OR MAYBE NOT! The Economist reported last week that it's only the American newspaper industry dying a slow, awful death. Newspaper sales are up 12 percent in Brazil this year. Sales in India are up 35 percent over the past five years. Ditto for Pakistan, and for China, which has seen recent circulation gains of 20 percent. So you see? Literacy isn't doomed; it just hates America.