Whap! Whap!

Well, my old home: The Columbian.

The daily paper in Vancouver, WA, is close to filing Chapter 11.

The paper built itself a fancy palace, moving in in January. There’s no kind way to put it. This was a stupid move.

So today the publisher announced that the paper is being forced to move back into its old building. Oh, and unless the company can refinance its current debt, it will file for bankruptcy.

Building the garish palace was a uniquely bad move, but the demise of the company offers lessons for every paper.

About 10 years ago, The Columbian hired a former Gannett editor who quickly stripped the paper of its local character, turning it into a clone of every corporate franchise in the country.

At the same time, the editor and publisher took a hard turn to the right politically.

Also at the same time, the company (which had been a pioneer in digital media) turned newsprint-centric, crippling the website while greatly expanding its print product.

So this newly right-wing, ink-on-paper dynasty did what every right-wing entity does: Go deeply in debt, mortgaging its future for short-term pleasure.

Today, the once-proud institution is a journalistic and business disaster.

I spent 24 years of my life at The Columbian. I felt I was part of a family. Part of something important. So I take no pleasure in saying that the institution I loved so much is now the poster child for the disaster I have been predicting.

I hope The Columbian survives. I hope other papers do, too.

They won’t, however, until they start firing the people at the top who created this mess instead of the hard-working people who are getting the pink slips.

The mainstream media cling desperately to this storyline. Here’s a classic example from newsweek.com.

The author makes a compelling argument that McCain is not a clone of George Bush, and is instead a maverick. How compelling? Let’s look:

• McCain either has long held, or recently has adopted, positions nearly identical to Bush’s on every major issue.
• George Bush governed using a divide-and-conquer strategy developed by Karl Rove (the author forgets to mention that Rove also is advising McCain).
• McCain will have to deal with a Democratic Congress and probably won’t be seeking another term (the author forgets to mention that Bush has been dealing with a Democratic Congress and isn’t seeking another term).

So there you have it, conclusive evidence that McCain is a maverick, not a Bush clone.

With their choice of a new host for “Meet The Press,” NBC execs have an opportunity to change the tone of political reporting and help restore some credibility for the mainstream media.

I know, they won’t, but wouldn’t be nice? Speculation centers on David Gregory, Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough. I have no qualms with Gregory, but Matthews and Scarborough? With either one, we’ll get more softball, wink-wink, nod-nod questions to Republican power brokers and more silly horse-race speculation. Issues, unless you define issues as “Jeremiah Wright,” will lose out again.

So here are some questions we still won’t hear on “Meet The Press” or in newspapers:

• Senators McCain and Obama, what are your strategies for Iraq?
• Senator McCain, what exactly will this great victory you promise in Iraq look like? How will we know when we achieve it?
• Senator McCain, will you make a read-my-lips-style promise of no new preemptive war? Even in Iran?
• Senator McCain, exactly how much do honestly promise to save by reducing earmarks? Please put that amount in perspective to overall federal spending.
• Senator Obama, will you commit to providing health care for every American if the insurance industry continues to deny coverage to millions?
• Senator McCain, do you honestly think buying drugs from Canada and stopping malpractice suits will fix our healthcare system? What’s your Plan B?
• Senator McCain, I see that you’re paying 25 percent interest on your enormous credit-card debt. Insurance companies and potential employers discriminate against people with bad credit, calling it a “character issue.” Does your bad credit constitute a character issue? If not, will you stand up and fight for ordinary Americans who face this stigma?
• Senators McCain and Obama, a question for both of you. What will you do about Guantanemo Bay?
• Another question for both of you. Will you commit, with no conditions, to providing high-quality, no-hassle health care to the thousands of Americans who have been maimed and disabled while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Finally, a question for David Gregory, Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough and the rest of the press corps: Will you commit to ask these and other substantive questions?

Yeah, didn’t think so. So back to the real issue … should Barack Obama pick someone with a patriotic-sounding name as his running mate? Someone who wears a lapel pin?

I’ve been highly critical of Tim Russert, but his death feels like a punch to the gut. Politics and punditry aside, what a sad day.

Your editors at The Record of Hackensack are on a witch hunt against liberal bias. They’re watching your every word, which might make you nervous, because “liberal bias“ is such a nebulous phrase.

I’m here to help. In several decades as a newspaper editor, I took hundreds of complaints about liberal bias, and in my current job I hunt them down on forums and in letters to the editor. I think I have some tips for you to avoid some common mistakes:

• Mention Barack Obama’s name only in reference to attacks against him. If you must print rebuttals, identify those making the rebuttals with adjectives such as “Muslim,” “left-wing,” “controversial,” or just plain “liberal.”
• Label any story about science, especially those about evolution, fossils, dinosaurs or global warming, as “theory.” Ideally, also use one or more of the adjectives above to describe the theory. This does not include any reference to science made from the pulpit of a conservative church, which should be reported as fact.
• Make no mention of terms such as “recession,” “lagging consumer confidence,” or “layoffs,” unless you explain that they are caused by consumer fears of an Obama presidency.
• Do not run any story identifying someone as gay unless it involves an indictment, incest, child pornography or overdue library books.
• Insert the phrase “where the John McCain-backed surge is working” after every reference to Iraq.
• Limit pictures of blacks to police mug shots.
• Do the same for pictures of Hispanics, but also list their immigration status.

You’ll make the occasional slip-up, like the one I made a few years ago when I ran an AccuWeather forecast for rain on the Fourth of July. I fielded an angry phone call from a woman who had heard a forecast of no rain on a local television station. This was clearly another example of the paper’s liberal bias because we wanted to discourage people from attending patriotic rallies.

Still, if you follow this advice I am confident you can reduce charges of liberal bias by up to 7 percent. There’s nothing you can do about other obvious signs of liberal bias, such as late papers, circulation rate increases, typos, ink that comes off on readers’ fingers, natural disasters …

And please, don’t let any of this crimp your writing style. Bias against gays, blacks, liberals, Muslims, the United Church of Christ and others is still OK.

In the New York Observer, Iraq war correspondents lament the lack of a narrative for their coverage (http://www.observer.com/baghdad).

What bothers me about the mainstream media coverage of Iraq is not the lack of narrative in the war zone. It’s the lack of coverage of the war in Washington. For example, what is John McCain’s strategy?

This morning on the Today show, McCain put on his best dismissive smirk and praised the glorious progress we’re making. When Matt Lauer lobbed him a softball question about when troops can start coming home, McCain’s smirk got bigger and he said it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

All that matters, he said, is that casualties remain low.

What sort of strategy is that? The war can go on forever, as long as casualties remain at a level he’s comfortable with.

Barack Obama’s strategy really isn’t much clearer, but no one presses either of them on this issue.

The narrative is there. The problem is the press, and the politicians, are afraid to tell it.

Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Brit Hume, Chris Wallace, Charles Gibson, Tim Russert … all smirky conservative newscasters. They’re OK. There’s really only one terrible threat to journalism on TV today, and he just happens to be the one liberal broadcaster: Keith Olbermann. Read the buffoonery from the oh-so-liberal Los Angeles Times here.

The Record of Hackensack is going ahead with its probe of nefarious LIBERAL BIAS.

Research uncovered for editors the startling fact that some people who believe the Record is liberal. Imagine that. Vague, unsupported shouts of “liberal bias!” The Record surely is the first newspaper to face this charge.

Where have these editors been? There is a very small, but very vocal, minority of readers at every paper who attribute anything they dislike about the paper to “liberal bias.” It’s and empty, meaningless phrase. Never mind that most papers blindly printed pro-war propaganda in their news columns, print attacks against Barack Obama in their news columns while giving Republicans a pass and now are picking up John McCain’s diversionary “congressional earmarks” cry in the name of investigative journalism.

Never mind that papers overwhelmingly endorsed George Bush on their editorial pages and print conservative op-ed columns far more often than liberal thought. Never mind all that. A few chants of “liberal bias,” and clueless editors respond by becoming even more conservative, alienating the majority of their potential marketplace.

Newspapers are not dying because of the internet. They’re dying because they have lost their audience, particularly their younger, better-educated readers. You know the type: Liberals.

Forget politics. This obsession with becoming more conservative is bad business.

So drink the Liberal Bias Kool-Aid, Record editors. The rest of us will watch one more newspaper continue in its death spiral.

This is not, strictly speaking, about newspapers. Then again, with the announcement of AP and 25 papers defining congressional earmarks as their critical campaign issue, maybe it is.

Apologists for the American health-care system long argued that we have the best quality of care in the world. That notion has largely been debunked, so the apologists cite the bureaucratic nightmare national health care would create. Hmmm. Let me tell you about bureaucratic nightmares …

Last week, we received a refund for an overpayment we made to a hospital. An overpayment we made in 2006.

This week, we received a letter from a collection agency for services rendered in January 2008. A bill for services the hospital has acknowledged, on several occasions, that we don’t even owe. After hours of frustrating calls, both the hospital and the collection agency have agreed to send us letters acknowledging their error. Anyone want to bet we don’t get one or both of those letters? Anyone want to bet we’ve heard the last from these folks?

In summary. When a hospital owes a patient a debt it doesn’t dispute, it takes two years to pay it (without interest). When a patient is wrongly billed, that bill makes it to a collection agency in four months (plus 15 percent interest).

And government health care would be a bureaucratic nightmare?

Yet the press mostly lets politicians skate when it comes to health care. John McCain mumbles something about health care here being the best in the world and the only fixes it needs is to stop malpractice suits, allow people to buy drugs from Canada and to slow the skyrocketing costs. Debate moderators and pundits yawn and nod their heads and get back to attacking Hillary Clinton’s depiction of her Bosnia visit and Barack Obama’s pastor scandal du jour.

Oh yes, and then papers ignore the issues of the day to instead eagerly jump on John McCain’s earmark bandwagon.

Maybe this really is about newspapers after all.

The Associated Press and 25 newspapers are launching an in-depth analysis of Congressional earmarks.

The press has been asleep for seven year of scandals, but now comes alive to carry John McCain’s torch.

We don’t know the results of this study yet, except that it’s sure to provide ammunition for the GOP, even if only one piece of pork is uncovered.

This project is not inherently bad until compared with newspapers’ sorry performance holding the Bush Administration accountable. Where was this effort during the run-up to war? For No Child Left Behind? For unfunded mandates? Health care? Media concentration? Federal appointments? Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Where was this project when the GOP ran Congress?

If nothing else, the press is letting McCain frame the debate. Compared to the war in Iraq, health care, Medicare, etc., earmarks are at the bottom of the priority list.

Unless you’re John McCain, who wants to divert the nation’s attention from these issues …