Lefty Journo Prof Decries Profit Motive In 'Killing' of Seattle P-I

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer could be going out of business.  And the culprit is . . . capitalism.  That's Pilgrim's Complaint. Tim Pilgrim, that is.  The professor of journalism at Western Washington University was quoted today in the P-I's article about its own pending demise. The P-I's parent company, the Hearst Corp., has put the paper up for sale, and prospects aren't good for finding a buyer.

But not to fear.  Prof. Pilgrim has a solution: 

[Pilgrim] suggested that the P-I staff buy the paper and run it at a lesser profit than Hearst requires -- perhaps assisted by a wealthy patron such as Bill Gates or Paul Allen.

A "lesser" profit?  What profit?  According to the same article, the paper has lost money every year since 2000, racking up $14 million in red ink in 2008.

Continued Pilgrim [emphasis added]:

If this kind of profit-driven killing of legitimate news sources keeps happening, the online 'news' outlets that repackage P-I and other newspaper content will be out of news and only have opinion (blogging, etc.) to post.

Pilgrim's personal page is a virtual parody of a left-wing professor.  The self-described "poet and teacher" offers resource links on three topics:

• America's rich get richer
• Government Lies & Propaganda [all by the Bush administration], and
• Alternative media list

The latter leads to links constituting a roll call of the left, including Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, The Nation, and, my favorite: "Adbusters -- working against advertising."  Looks like the P-I succeeded only too well in that quest!

Given his screaming lack of objectivity, the spectacle of Pilgrim decrying the death of "legitimate" news sources in favor of opinion bloggers is a bad joke.  Has the professor considered that "journalism" professors such as himself share responsibility for the very death of print journalism he decries?  It's in part because the MSM is filled with "journalists" taught by the Professor Pilgrims of the academic world that Americans increasingly turn elsewhere for their news.