Pat Robertson may buy Norfolk newspaper monopoly

The Virginian-Pilot is the only daily newspaper remaining in Norfolk, Virginia - probably one of the top 50 media markets in America. (This isn't counting nearby cities like Newport News that have a paper just for part of the area.) And now national disgrace Pat Robertson appears to be looking to turn the Virginian-Pilot into his personal conservative mouthpiece.

Multimillionaire Robertson says his attorneys are looking into purchasing the paper after it published articles that he objects to. For instance, a piece in the Virginian-Pilot not long ago reported that the counseling program at Robertson's Regent University has lost almost half its faculty members and that students have been punished for expressing their concerns. Robertson has a history of criticizing the Virginian-Pilot for not being friendly enough to his many projects.

If Robertson has so little tolerance for dissent that his university would punish students for voicing legitimate concerns about the loss of all their teachers, think what a Robertson-run newspaper would be like.

In an e-mail to an assistant, Robertson said that taking over the paper "would be particularly helpful to provide internships for Regent University journalism students." Now I bet journalists who come from that school are damn conservative! The Princeton Review even ranked Regent as the most conservative school in the country. I'm not saying a paper should hire exclusively liberal journalists, but hey, let's try to have some balance here.

If Pat Robertson does indeed buy the Virginian-Pilot, that paper will surely join several other American dailies in a toxic category of advocacy journalism. Papers in my area in recent years have been conservative, but they're nothing like the naked advocates of extremism that Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, the current incarnation of the New York Sun, or the Oklahoman of Oklahoma City are. (The UPI is in this category after Moon took it over.) As with the Virginian-Pilot, the Oklahoman is a monopoly - in a metropolitan area about the same size as Norfolk.

So don't think bad papers will get competitors. Buying or starting a full-tilt daily paper is costly, and the business is not as lucrative as it was. Like the Oklahoman, an extreme conservative version of the Virginian-Pilot would likely control the entire market share in a major city just because it costs too much to run a competitor. (That is, unless the Newport News paper starts targeting Norfolk. Because that publication had Tony Snow as their opinion page editor, I'm sure they're not exactly a progressive voice either.) A whole city would be influenced by its views.

Imagine if you can a big city where Pat Robertson - who advocated blowing up the State Department with a nuclear bomb - has such sway over the news.

What it really proves is that if you're rich and if a newspaper prints something you don't like, you can just buy 'em up! It's no wonder the media is already so out of step with the people.

(Source: http://hamptonroads.com/2008/01/pat-robertson-says-his-attorneys-are-looking-bid-virginianpilot)