Ouch

Ken Hanner, national editor of The Washington Times, is axed after 26 years at the paper.

Like I said, "Extremely gloomy."

UPDATE: Similarly gloomy reports at The New York Times.

That both the conservative Washington Times and the liberal New York Times are faced with staff reductions (and Ken Hanner's departure is certainly not the last such involuntary exit you'll hear abougt in coming days) bolsters my contention that liberal bias alone does not account for the downward spiral of the newspaper industry.

The underlying problem -- which no one wants to face -- is the declining number of literate Americans. "New Media" blather ignores this reality. Yes, readership of online media has increase astronomically in the 15 years since the Internet began to become a mass phenomenon. But total U.S. online readership does not begin to equal what total U.S. newspaper readership was in 1993.

Young Americans read less than older Americans, and young Americans are particularly reading less about politics and other "hard news" subject matter. The generation that finished school prior to the disastrous educational experiments of the 1960s and '70s is, on average, far more literate than the generations educated afterwards. As older readers die off, they are not being replaced with equal numbers of new readers.

We are becoming a nation of semi-literates, and semi-literates are a poor market for the printed word.