Two announcements today

* The San Francisco Chronicle said it needed to cut $50 million, sell the paper or close.  Hearst has already made the same announcement in Seattle with a 60 day notice. Considering that there are only 275 newsroom employees left, no cut in employment will be sufficient.  That makes June 1 the funeral date.

I've pointed out the many failures of the Chronicle and other urban newspapers that is killing them.  One thing that I haven't mentioned is that the horrible Lefty political bias is destroying the central city traditional newspapers.  If the S.F. Chronicle only needed readers in San Francisco, being Lefty would be fine.  But the Chronicle at its peak had 150k San Francisco weekday readers plus 375k Bay Area suburban readers. Now there are less than 100k in San Francisco and 230k outside S.F.  Suburban readers are overwhelmingly conservative, even in the S.F. Bay Area.

That loss of readers can be explained by one issue alone, the departure of middle of the road suburban readers who are sick of Lefty ideology.  The suburbanites now have the S.F. Examine to read, Fox to watch and plenty of sites on the Internet.  Lefty politics is a direct cause of readership evaporation.

* On the same subject, today the New Republic excoriates the mainstream media for generating public disgust with MSN's dishonest reporting, political bias and simple incompetence.

Of course the New Republic has the worst record of anyone.  Lies and fraud from Scott Beauchamp reporting from Iraq and worse yet, a cover-up by editor Franklin Foer.