>How then were 1000 or 10,000 capitalist owners (almost all a monopoly in
>their localities) any better than 50. Upton Sinclair in The Brass Check
>notes that no paper in one large city would print a news story on a rape
>of a woman by the son of a large department store owner.
Exactly. Local papers (and TV & radio stations) in the US almost universally suck. There's a lot more diversity on cable TV now than there was on broadcast TV a generation ago. It's far better to have the NYT in national distribution than to rely on the birdcage liners that pass for newspapers in much of the country. Can we grow out of this one?
Doug