All Blog Posts from Public Eye

There hasn’t been a ton of great news for the newspaper industry, well, since the late eighties, and the latest circulation numbers were no exception. Overall circulation was down almost 3 percent from the same period in 2005. There was a glimmer of hope for the New York tabloids, however. The Washington Post explained today that “the New York Post's circulation was up 5 percent, while the Daily News's rose 1 percent.”

That’s not quite how the Post and the News spun it, however. (See above, courtesy of Gothamist.)

The unending rivalry between the Post and the News has now taken a page from well, their own pages (at least those that mention the mid-term election hoohah.) And yes, they sound exactly like political campaign managers. Number 5 on the Post’s “Top Ten Reasons The Post Beat The News”? “We break news – they break promises and don’t pay contest winners.”

Um, Snap?

Not to worry, the News hit back. “The Daily News is still New York's Hometown Newspaper - and by a wide margin.” Further down, the News quotes its editor in chief and deputy publisher, who “took dead aim at his half-price competitor” with this thoughtful tidbit: "If you'd lost $300 million over the past five years, spent $200 million on new presses, carpet-bombed neighborhoods with free copies and lost fortunes to sell a few thousand papers in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, you'd be desperate to celebrate creeping a few copies ahead of us. The Daily News is STILL unequivocally the No. 1 newspaper in the place that counts - New York."

Perhaps this kind of mud-slinging will have the same effect for tabloids that it has had on voter turnout.

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"TUNNEL BOMB PLOT" trumpeted the New York Daily News this morning on its cover, the words printed in big bold white letters against a black background. Jihadists, said the paper, had a "serious" plot to flood lower Manhattan by bombing the Holland Tunnel, "to drown the Financial District as New Orleans was by Hurricane Katrina."

Frightening? Sure. "Serious?" Well, the jury is still out. The "largely aspirational" plot never went beyond e-mails, there was no credible link to Al Qaeda, and there was no specific mention of the Holland Tunnel, just the mass transit system more generally; additionally, sources say "no one in the United States ever took part in the Internet conversations and…no one ever purchased any explosives or scouted the transit system."

The plot as the Daily News conceived it seemed absurd enough that one would have thought it would have given editors pause – how does one flood lower Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel, seeing as the island is above the level of the river? But that didn't stop the paper from rushing its inaccurate story into print and trumpeting it with BIG BOLD LETTERS, and it didn't stop other news organizations from turning the alleged plot into a huge story. That's no surprise, of course. When people speak of bias in the press, they tend to talk abut political bias, but the more serious bias is towards sensationalism, which tends to sell better. (It's safe to say the Daily News moved a few more copies this morning than usual.)

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According to the New York Daily News, the big story yesterday wasn't the sentence handed down to Zacarias Moussaoui dictating that he would get life in prison, not a death sentence. That, after all, only got announced in small type on the cover. No, the big news was that HE'S STILL GOING TO HELL. Just curious: How do you think they sourced that?

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