Detroit Free Press Circulation Drops Even Though I Warned Editor That Its Bias Would Cause This

Two years ago I exchanged emails with the managing editor of the Detroit Free Press. The topic of our discussion was the Free Press coverage of the Middle East conflict, specifically the situation where Hezbollah shot rockets into Israel and Israel responded, but as our email exchange went on, the topic widened to a larger discussion about the Detroit Free Press' bias with its reporting.

My overall point was that the Free Press was promoting only a liberal agenda in its pages, and was slanted heavily to the left, and that that would hurt the Free Press and it would have to cut service and lower its quality, and I didn't want that. Several times in our email exchange I expressed support for the Free Press and dismay that its current policies were going to lead it in the wrong direction. And I was right.

According to editorandpublisher via drudge comes this article (Top 25 Daily Newspapers in New FAS-FA) that points out over the past year that the Detroit Free Press has lost 10% of its customers. It has cut its daily delivery service, cut its comic section, cuts its sports section, and has dropped in paper and color quality. This is in no small part because of its liberal bias, and I predicted it 2 years ago.

When I confronted the editor of the Detroit Free Press with allegations of bias, he responded by rejecting my concerns and dismissing them, claiming that circulation was going up and his paper was becoming more successful. Liberal views do not usually match reality though, and the reality was that his liberal bias was in fact hurting his paper, as I alleged.

Our email exchange was telling. After I alleged bias in the Free Press news coverage, his first reply to me was to shift the blame on to the 'wire services.' He claimed that all his paper was doing was reporting the news, as it was told to them by the AP, and thus his paper had no bias. I told him that it was still his paper, and that if the AP was biased and all he did was repeat their bias, his paper would indeed be biased. I understood he was shifting blame and dodging the issue, and when I confronted him again, his reply was interesting.

He told me:

Neither side likes some of what it hears. We like what the wire services provide to us. Unlike the Internet sites, when our wire services do not make mistakes. There is no more reliable sources for information than the major wire services. You surely are free to believe anything you want to- from some kooky web site if you want- but here at the Free Press, we will stick with the wire services, regardless if you think they are biased.

He went on to justify his decision:

Circulation, by the way, is soaring, and so I don't think we need to change anything about how we run our newspaper.

I guess in retrospect I was right and he was wrong. By running his newspaper the same way, with a firm liberal bias and a reliance on liberal wire services like the AP and Reuters, the Editor of the Detroit Free Press choose to take his newspaper in the wrong direction and drive away customers. I guess I'm just confused why.