Los Angeles Times death watch

Mickey Kaus has been fighting a Los Angeles Times battle. In his LAT Desperation Update today he got a phone call to welcome him back, despite his multiple cancellations, their continued billing, and his phone calls. He is referring other victims of the "sleazy LAT death-spiral circ. tactics" to contact the California Attorney General's online complaint form.

Scroll down to Saturday, Sept. 17th for his LAT Death Spiral Watch #1 and #2. He asks, "Isn't it, you know, illegal?" to refuse to cancel subscriptions and bill for papers never delivered. It's a policy they have pursued for years.

We cancelled our subscription to the Los Angeles Times years and years ago and received it for nearly two months afterwards. Then they tried to bill us for the unwanted papers. It got to be a joke in our neighborhood where at one time every house got the paper; today only one house get the paper at 4 am. That's anecdotal, but it is a fact of declining circulation. To give you some idea how far the paper has fallen in the last 30 years, you have to look at their circulation.

I collect old Almanacs for their obscure facts. A 1977 CBS News Almanac ("More than a million facts and records") shows the circulation of the Los Angeles Times (p767) at 1,227,377. That was primarily in Southern California. In order to disguise their shrinking subscribership, the Times started delivery in zones all the way from San Diego to Sacramento and even published a Washington, DC edition. It made for the worst penetration rate in the newspaper business. Today, the Los Angeles Times sells nearly a quarter of a million less papers than they did in 1977, some 900,000 papers in a state where population has tripled in the last 30 years.

I have made the point for years that the MSM isn't in the business of selling papers. They are in the business of setting a political agenda, controlling and driving the Democrat party to the fringes of the political spectrum where it is now stuck on stupid. Howard Fineman called it the American Mainstream Media Party.

The MSM is still engaged in a political war with the American people, trying to impose a political ideology most of us repudiate first at the subscription level, then at the ballot box, refusing to accept their willy nilly social engineering projects, and rejecting their ill-considered candidates. It doesn't deter them. They are, after all, engaged in a war against us. And our elected representatives.