He left out another important reason - roughly half the population (conservatives) have stopped reading them because of a liberal bias (perceived or otherwise).

He left out another important reason - roughly half the population (conservatives) have stopped reading them because of a liberal bias (perceived or otherwise). While we'd like to think that journalists are going to be neutral, they simply aren't, they are human and they let their biases creep into their stories. And the circulation for papers that endorsed Obama was 4 times greater than those that endorsed McCain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_United_States_presidential_election,_2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_U...) I was on the Young Adult Board of contributors for the Des Moines Register and one of the editors very much admitted to me that they were losing subscriptions like mad because conservatives stopped reading their paper. Consequently, I was published much more frequently than other members of the board because I have a conservative view on things, while the other 48 people almost all came from a liberal persuasion. I know it certainly wasn't because of the quality of my writing, I know it sucked, but I'm an engineer not an English major.