If you want to know why American newspapers are dying, plough through this Boston Globe snoozefest on political blogging until you get to this paragraph: Meanwhile, most presidential campaigns have hired consultants to promote their candidates to bloggers. One candidate, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, came under attack for allegedly insensitive statements that had been made by two bloggers he hired. They eventually resigned. “Allegedly insensitive”? You’re referring to two foul-mouthed gals who call Christians “Godbags” and do semen gags about the Virgin Mary and sneer at stillbirths, and all you can say about it is “came under attack for allegedly insensitive statements”? That’s not the story, that’s the sound of the genteel Victorian matron discreetly draping chintz over the provocative piano legs of the story***.

Why would anyone pay money for anything so wan, weedy, wimpy, and washed-out? As long as major newspapers think this kind of prissy evasion is “good journalism”, they’ll continue to bleed readers. Because no-one who enjoys reading can read sentences like that, and no-one you’re trying to convert will think it’s a pleasure worth acquiring.

(***Those piano-leg covering matrons are only apocryphal, unlike the “allegedly insensitive statements”, which are plastered all over the Internet.)