Craig Crawford thinks our near-Depression will kill the newspaper industry.

This is a business that was already in free fall before this recession hit. Readership and advertising revenue had been on the decline for some time. Make no mistake about it: For newspapers, this is a full blown depression.

Without decent ad revenues, newspapers cannot survive. 

The newspaper business model is usually described as a function of total readership because that attracts the biggest advertisers. But the essential ingredient to newspaper success is quality readership. USA Today has more readers than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but trails both in the quality of their readers. 

Unfortunately, big city newspapers like the New York Times are losing those quality readers for two reasons: the pull of high-quality blogs and the push of low-quality reporting and editorializing.

The quality of newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times started dropping right after Watergate. When Ronald Reagan mobilized the right to sweep into power in 1980, the Washington Press Corpse dropped to its knees and remained there for 12 long years.

They only rose from their knees to attack Bill Clinton with the Whitewater smear campaign led by Jeff Gerth of the New York Times. And for eight long years, they attacked Clinton relentlessly. Despite Monicagate, they failed to destroy Clinton, but that only made them more determined to destroy Al Gore - and they succeeded. 

Big city newspapers might have redeemed themselves if they were as critical of Bush as they were of Clinton. But they helped him steal the election in Florida and then enthusiastically supported his $1.35 trillion tax redistribution to the rich. And in 2002-2003, they actively helped him defraud the nation into an invasion of Iraq, despite knowing Iraq had no WMD's.

After the Iraq debacle, there was no reason for an intelligent person to read a major newspaper. When the obituary of American newspapers is written, it will be the editors-in-chief of those papers - especially Len Downie Jr. of the Post along with Howell Raines and Bill Keller of the Times - who deserve the blame.