Well the title says it all - because they really do. I was just reading a Powerline article about the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and got to thinking about how pissed I was on Sunday when I read the Delaware Newsjournal and thought “My god, it’s like reading the New Indicator.”

The “New Indicator” was the campus Communist rag of my alma-mater UC-San Diego. Nobody read the thing because it was full of socialist slogans - meaning lots! of exclamation marks! - as if punctuation could make up for the emptiness of the writing.

This was the time before blogs, and one when I considered myself to be closer to the Left side of things, so for an aspiring political writer I thought that I would join the New Indicator and see if I could add some substance to the thing. I

I attended one meeting with my roommate Adam - a Jewish biker from Philly (email me you bastard) - and all I recall is a terrible smell in the office and listless hippies who needed no-doze or crystal meth to get up off their butts and take a bath. So, to make a long story short, that was it for me and the New Indicator which - according to a recent alumni caller - is no more. Boo fucking hoo…

It used to be that I read at least two newspapers a day - in Japan it was three being that the English ones were quite small. Now I don’t read a single one daily, and often skip the Sunday edition of the NewsJournal because honestly, who gives a rat’s ass about the Mayor of Elsmere using a city vehicle to pick up his kid from Little League.

Why? Becuase the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, LA Times, Philly Inquirer - all the newspapers have the same Leftist slant. They run the same Left-wing columnists with the token Robert Novak and Cal Thomas. They run the same articles from the pro-European/anti-American Reuters, French AFP, and leftist AP wireservices. They run the same Left-wing anti-Bush, anti-military, pro-UN and pro-transnationalist opinions. Even their formats are the same. First section important news, second section local, then sports, business and finally lifestyle.

There is nothing new in newspapers. There are no innovative ideas. There is no balance to the slant - only the dogma that newspapers are non-biased. Most newspapers hold monopolies in their markets and when criticized deny it by saying that there is no market for a right-wing newspaper - ignoring the fact that the start-up costs for a newspaper are just as prohibitive as for a software company with a new operating system to take on Microsoft.

So I’ve stopped reading all newspapers and rely upon weblogs in their place. This has happened gradually over the past 4 years and during that time I notice that blogs have lessened their reliance on the mainstream media for content. Years back most blogs used a newsarticle as the basis for discussion, but today the Blogosphere has its own articles and columnists and the reliance upon newspapers is decreasing.

Since Chomsky is enamored of the place yet oddly doesn’t call it home, here’s the take from a man who deserted his post 40 years ago and defected to North Korea:

Deserter Apologizes for Defecting to North Korea
Deserter Apologizes for Defecting to N. Korea

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

WELDON, N.C. — On the eve of his return to the remote Japanese exile island that he now calls home, U.S. Army deserter Charles Jenkins (search) apologized for his more than 40-year-old decision to abandon his post for life in North Korea (search).

Jenkins, who was expected to leave his boyhood home of North Carolina early Tuesday morning for an afternoon flight from Dulles International Airport to Tokyo (search), said his decision to defect to communist North Korea in 1965 was wrong.

“I let my soldiers down. I let the U.S. Army down. I let the government down, and I made it very difficult for my family in the United States to live,” Jenkins said.

Speaking at his sister’s home in Weldon, the 65-year-old Jenkins said he lived in harsh conditions in North Korea. While there, he thought he would never again see his mother, Pattie. They were reunited last week.

Jenkins was a 24-year-old sergeant with the U.S. Army’s 1st Calvary Division when he left the squad he was leading on patrol in the Demilitarized Zone and walked into North Korea on July 5, 1965.

While he appeared in North Korean propaganda films and taught English, Jenkins said North Korean agents were never able to break him and he was never brainwashed. On Monday, he called North Korean leader Kim Jong Il “an evil man.”

“He only believes in one thing — his own personal luxury life,” he said.

Jenkins remained in North Korea after his Japanese-born wife, who had been kidnapped from Japan in 1978, returned to her home country in 2002. The couple was reunited last year in Japan, where he was court-martialed and served 25 days in a U.S. military jail.

Jenkins’ wife, Hitomi Soga, called for more attention in the United States and Japan to the plight of Japanese abductees she said remain in North Korea.

“There are still people in North Korea who were abducted, and I want more people from Japan and America to pay attention and help solve this problem,” Soga said through an interpreter.

The couple — along with their two daughters, who accompanied them on their visit to North Carolina — have no plans to move permanently back to the United States. Jenkins has said the primary purpose of his weeklong trip was to visit his ailing mother and make a final visit to his homeland.

“He’s certainly not a hero. He didn’t get a parade coming home,” Michael Cooke, of Raleigh, a boyhood friend and Vietnam veteran, said Monday. “What he did was a despicable thing.”

But Cooke said he spent more than two hours Friday night catching up with Jenkins, his family and three other old friends from their days as boys in Rich Square, a town about 30 miles southeast of Weldon.

Cooke brought along old photos and a copy of the 1954 Rich Square telephone book to help remember names long forgotten.

They spent no time asking Jenkins why he deserted, or about how he lived for decades in one of the world’s most isolated countries.

“We didn’t get into any of that heavy stuff,” Cooke said. “We didn’t get an apology.”

The most telling moment of their reunion, Cooke said, was seeing the joy in Jenkins’ 91-year-old mother’s eyes. “Ms. Jenkins seemed as happy as she could be to have her son home,” he said.

When asked Monday about reuniting with his mother, Jenkins became emotional.

“It’s very difficult to express, to put into words, how I feel,” he said. “I didn’t feel I would ever see her again.”