It seems the news media business sector is dying from a bad case of liberal bias. It has been known for years that news rooms, especially national ones, are ~90% liberal democrat in surveys done. And as the nation moved from the liberal democrats to the conservatives over the last 3 decades the news rooms have been stubbornly trying to keep their biased views intact. The culmination of this echo chamber effect came when Dan Rather, so obsessed with George Bush winning the White House, ran with forged documents and pretended, even if fakes, they were an accurate representation. What they were was an accurate representation of the fiction that runs through most news organizations.

This biased reporting has driven the news media so far out of sync with America they cannot relate to, understand or report on America as most Americans see it. This could have been fixed by simply diversifying the news room. But that would dilute the liberal (or progressive) message, which proves that the bias is something those in the news organizations are protecting since, after decades of the country ‘moving on’ the news organizations have failed to follow suite.

But news is a commodity. It requires credibility to be accepted. As Dan Rather and numerous other stories have shown, being biased destroys credibility. And so the news media business sector is being rocked by stories like this one:

Media conglomerate Tribune Co. reported a $78 million fourth-quarter loss from continuing operations Thursday as it copes with the historic downturn in the newspaper industry.

…

The company also said full-year income from continuing operations was $55 million, down from $661 million in 2006. It blamed the declines on lower revenues, higher interest expense and other factors as advertising and circulation continued to slide.

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Zell had initially said he intended to keep Tribune’s core newspapers, which include the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, The (Baltimore) Sun, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant. But he indicated to employees of The Sun last week that a difficult economy and steeper-than-expected decline in revenue could prompt a re-evaluation of that plan.

Noting that Tribune newspapers were experiencing revenue declines of 16 percent to 18 percent from a year earlier, he said: “If that trend continues, we may have to re-evaluate a lot of our decisions.”

This is not the only large news organization feeling the pinch. The NY Times is having to answer to shareholders for its plummeting revenues – which are directly linked, in my humble opinion, to the liberal bias surfacing in their reporting and Op-Eds:

New York Times Co said on Monday that it will add two seats to its board of directors and give them to a group of dissident investors to avert a proxy battle.

The Times, under a deal with hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners and investment firm Firebrand Partners, will raise the number of board seats to 15 from 13.

Harbinger and Firebrand have spent more than $500 million to amass a 19 percent stake in the Times since late December, making them the company’s largest public shareholder.

They had proposed four nominees to the board and threatened to take their slate directly to shareholders at the company’s annual meeting on April 22, creating the possibility that all four could get elected.

“Our nominees look forward to working with the other directors and management to build and deliver value for all shareholders,” Harbinger Senior Managing Director Philip Falcone said in a statement.

Death by liberal bias is a terrible way for a once vaunted industry to financially collapse. But the warning signs have been out there for more than a decade. There is nothing wrong with reflecting the broad range of views and beliefs that reside in America, and that kind of diverse group tend to share views – not hammer each other with them. Any group seeking purity is seeking extinction.