Was it just a pie in face of newspapers?

It wasn't quite as dramatic as watching John Dean testify about Watergate.
The panel questioning Rupert Murdoch Tuesday was striving to get at the bottom of wrongdoing, as in Watergate.
The drama seemed more to come from a juvenile pie-throwing gesture than any revelations. That gesture took attention away from any possible revelations.
The media couldn't resist that. Fox News was glad because it diverted attention.
Fox News is part of the Murdoch media empire and flexes its muscle in U.S. politics.
Murdoch has been attracted to the political sphere. I consider it almost an eccentricity. "News" has little to do with the bottom line of News Corp. "News" is anything but a growth proposition today.
Information is becoming free and the public loves it.
We say we revere old journalistic institutions but that's only an ingrained notion. The notion was implanted in years past when the corporate media were indispensable. Families would arise in the morning and consume the daily paper.
Often I would even acquire the afternoon Minneapolis Star, you know, the paper that had "Star" in that little yellow block at the top. Jim Klobuchar would have another tome-length piece on the Minnesota Vikings.
Because we accepted newspapers into our families, we deferred to them and might be inclined to be defensive on their behalf.
Naturally there has been a relentless onslaught over the past several years vs. the essential role of newspapers.
Nobody wants to say anything bad about them. It's also hard to say anything bad about someone in his 80s like Murdoch. When he gropes to answer a question or appears to draw a blank, we understand.
Many of us assume that because he owns the likes of the Wall Street Journal, he's a power player on the world stage. But you could argue that news is a drag on the far-flung operations of News Corp.
News Corp. is primarily an entertainment company and a successful one. The news stuff just gives elder statesman Murdoch a bully pulpit. He enjoys it the way an adolescent boy might enjoy a slingshot.
He gets a feeling of power and brings attention to himself and his operations. Until he slings a rock into someone's window.
And this is what has happened, in effect, in the current mess.
Murdoch pleads ignorance because his empire is so far-flung. When asked if he simply takes responsibility, he answers with a sharp "no," even though the manly and politically proper response would be to take responsibility for his own company.
But remember, he's in his 80s. His son James doesn't have that excuse.
Seated next to the patriarch, James evades, rationalizes or takes any other maneuvers to avoid a John Dean moment. A common refuge is to say that because of ongoing police investigations, "I cannot answer at this time."
Rupert and James may escape true culpability. They may not end up talking to the portraits on the wall like Richard Nixon.
Their exact fate may end up not meaning much. There are forces within News Corp. that will fix things according to the usual business pressures. All things being equal, this is always the desirable outcome.
Business doesn't want to bother with news reporting anymore.
All of us have heard news reports about the declining fortunes of newspapers.
A very knowledgeable media observer reports that those pesky paper advertising circulars that are flung at us all the time, have about two years left before they're gone. Like everything else, this info is migrating to the much more efficient and environmentally friendly electronic media.
Hallelujah.
The pace of newspaper decline has been the subject of analysis and speculation over the last 6-7 years. It has been said newspapers had a "near death experience" in 2009.
Media maven Michael Wolff, a biographer of Rupert Murdoch, once predicted (wrongly) that 80 percent of all newspapers would be gone within 18 months.
Newspapers used some tricks. Cuts and consolidation bought some time. But they haven't righted the ship. The numbers are still coming in on a downward course.
Newspapers are betting that their legacy customers can sustain them a while longer - people who have it ingrained in their heads that newspapers are good, wholesome and pillars of democracy and, well, everything upstanding.
It serves none of us to be deferential to the likes of Murdoch. He's knee-deep in trouble, mainly because of misdeeds at News of the World, which I have never seen.
I had to think twice to realize this wasn't the same paper as Weekly World News.
The latter is the uproarious publication that gave us "Batboy" and proclaims things like Dick Cheney is a robot. I used to peruse copies at the employee lounge at Quinco Press in Lowry.
Weekly World News with its cast of space aliens is now online only. It's as good a harbinger as any for understanding where the print media is going.
Our community of Morris is a pretty good little laboratory too. We have a chain paper here which contradicts the underlying spirit of community newspapers. It has halved its production, now coming out once a week in comparison to twice when it was locally owned.
They will spin this so it's seemingly not so bad, naturally. But I would compare such a move to, say, Willie's Super Valu shutting down half its store and then telling people "hey, it's no big deal."
("No big deal" is so Scandinavian and Upper Midwest. Nobody likes a "big deal" because it's discomforting.)
Now, a lot of towns have a "weekly" paper, towns like Chokio and Clinton. But historically, Morris has exuded more vitality than these sleepy rural towns.
I don't know, given some developments here maybe we just aren't that vital anymore. Coborn's sits empty and decaying. Ditto UBC.
The newspaper is owned by a company out of Fargo. The management strings are often pulled out of Detroit Lakes.
Detroit Lakes is a tourist town unlike Morris. I think the perspective there is different from here. But so what? The management strings are going to be pulled based on numbers, not on being attuned to the community.
Forum Communications will make some decisions based on consolidation, which I understand is why two employees were laid off here not long ago.
The company will say they had to do it. But what are their profit criteria?
In the short term, newspapers can still make money. In business there's the term "harvesting" which some say applies to newspapers. They're bringing in the crop now and the ground will lay bare henceforth.
And the public is played for a sucker, at least that portion of the public that ascribes "legacy" value to newspapers.
I smiled early this week when entering Willie's Super Valu and seeing a "sign of the times," a sign asking customers to "sign up and receive our weekly emails with links to our weekly ad and website."
There's a chance to win prizes. I have already signed up.
I'm sure the parent company would love it if everyone would just avail themselves of this now. The cost and hassle of those awful paper circulars, strewn out and about every week, would be eliminated.
Super Valu knows this probably cannot be accomplished overnight. But the expert I cited earlier says "two years" - the lifespan likely remaining for paper ad circulars.
If you get the Morris newspaper you get a pile of these. They appear to be buttressing the Forum's business model. In time we won't care what the Forum wants to foist on us, any more than we'll care how Murdoch operates his business empire.
The old "institutional media" which enjoyed flexing its muscles will atrophy, and is in fact atrophying as we speak.
It might be a headline in the Weekly World News: "Newspapers mysteriously disappearing."
Willie's Super Valu won't have to pay to advertise. They could lower prices or maybe (preferably) give employees a bump upward in salary.
"Eureka!" Paul Martin might proclaim.
Paul follows in the iconic Willie's footsteps much more gracefully than James Murdoch relative to his old man.
And Fox News? It can just go away or at least quit behaving like a rabid dog from the far right politically. What we need is a dose of the "people loving" that Willie's Super Valu has made famous in its slogans.
"Love ya."
- Brian Williams - morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com