Journalism Is Failing Because of Single Moms on Welfare

Latest

It’s not the internet or the those stupid young people who won’t pay for things or the cost of paper that’s thrown the media landscape into a tizzy: it’s women. That’s according to Chris Powell, the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer out of Manchester, Connecticut, who has penned an op-ed about the real people responsible for the downfall of traditional media. Let’s learn about these she-devils, shall we?

Powell has managed to connect the potential long-term success of the Washington Post (now under the ownership of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos) and other publications with a local bent to the sad state of affairs in his state of Connecticut. According to Powell, Connecticut (which regularly rates quite high as far as quality of of life is concerned) is only “supposedly prosperous and well-educated”; it’s a state that consists of far too many children who “are being raised without two parents at home and thus acquiring developmental handicaps”:

Indeed, newspapers still can sell themselves to traditional households — two-parent families involved with their children, schools, churches, sports, civic groups, and such. But newspapers cannot sell themselves to households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they’re living in, and couldn’t afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read. And such households constitute a rising share of the population.

Good thing Powell is thinking of the landlords! It doesn’t seem ridiculous to speculate that in his spare time, he might be one himself, as this isn’t the first time he’s used his space in the Journal Inquirer to bring up The Plight of the Landlord. In February, Powell got some heat for wondering whether or not we aren’t just a little too concerned about standing up for people who suffer from mental illness when we should be worried about landlords who might have to have irresponsible living in their properties:

So is a landlord necessarily irrational and hateful in his reluctance to rent to someone who may behave badly but claim not to be responsible for himself on account of illness, who may bother his neighbors, and who may have trouble holding a job and paying rent and still prove impossible to evict against a claim of wrongful discrimination?

When he’s not spending his days standing up for landlords everywhere, Powell likes to write about racism and how much it sucks (his parents took part in the March on Washington, you see). But as for those single mothers, he says they’re part of a problem “much bigger than journalism”:

This social disintegration and decline in civic engagement coincide with the decline of traditional journalism just as much as the rise of the Internet does.

If you’re a single mom and you’d like to voice your single mom thoughts, you could go to the Journal Inquirer‘s website ON THE INTERNET to share them. Unfortunately, according to a commenter on Poynter, the comments are being heavily moderated, so anything you’ve got to say probably won’t show up. But you don’t read legacy publications anyway, so just forget we mentioned this whole thing and go back to ruining society.

Journalism’s problem may not be the Internet [Journal Inquirer] via Poynter

Image via qvist/Shutterstock

 
Join the discussion...