When Good Newspapers Go Bad

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," proudly biased since 2005! Fair and balanced treatment? Is that what you want? Good bloody luck finding it. In fact, tell me if you do. I'll send you the Brooklyn Bridge.

A little more than a year ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer and its poor little sibiling the Daily News got sold because some fat cat venture capitalist in Florida wasn't making enough profit on Knight Ridder stock.

The new owner of both newspapers is a local guy who loves his sports teams, and that has allowed the Daily News to survive. (It has the best sportswriters in the country.) Any other buyer would have crused the DN like a bug.

Mind you, the Philadelphia metropolitan region, better known as the Delaware Valley, has more liberals in it than you can cluster in an anti-war protest.

Ah, but here's the rub. The new owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News is a conservative Roman Catholic who made his fortune as an advertising executive. His clients included the Philadelphia Archdiocese.

The new owner promised that he would maintain the newspapers' editorial integrity. And it's not like the paper didn't have conservative columnists. It runs George Will and Jonah Goldberg and even has its own rah-rah-for-the-war-in-Iraq op ed guy named Kevin Moron ... errrr ... Ferris.

But that just wasn't enough.

Oh, the puff pieces we now get every day about benificent nuns and kindly priests! We at "The Gods Are Bored" are ready to convert! (um, not really.)

For awhile we cancelled our subscription, but we need that daily weather report and horoscope in order to function in polite society. So we re-instated.

This past Thursday, a new bi-weekly columnist wrote his first piece. More likely, someone wrote it for him.

That columnist is Rick Santorum.

One marvels at the cheek of a newspaper owner who would hire the most virulent conservative in the whole pack of hounds (mmmmm ... hounds ... down, Ricky down!) in a city where he was defeated like an egg-sucking dog, by something like 80 percent of the electorate. (mmmmm ... egg sucking dogs ... down, Ricky, down!)

In his first column, Ricky enumerated the variety of names he had been called in the pages of the paper. (Among the best, "snake oil peddler" and "chicken-livered.") He didn't say whether those names had appeared in reader commentary, news stories, or official editorials.

He promised a bold agenda ... to get past partisanship and unite us all on common ground.

Yeah, okay. Right. Right. Right.

Anyway, midway in the process of phoning to voice our disdain, we at "The Gods Are Bored" realized that we need fodder for our little site here. So we officially welcome the opinions of Mr. Rick Santorum, along with the Catholic Church puff pieces, to the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

We will respond to them promptly every other Thursday. A Daily News columnist, whose blog is super lively, promises to do the same. The columnist (his name is Will Bunch, he went to college with Keith Who Will Not Be Named) is a professional. I'm an amateur. Please visit us both, I promise I'll link Ricky's drivel to my space. Well, maybe. Okay, possibly. Yuck -- sometimes you gotta swim with the leeches.

Ex- (with emphasis on the EX)-Senator Santorum's column is called "The Elephant in the Room." Where are those nasty ivory poachers when you really need them?