Zogby’s poll was conducted for an East Coast think tank using a sample of nearly 2,000 people. It more or less mirrors most recent polls, such as those conducted by the Pew Center and others, showing a huge surge of disrespect for the work journalists do. On surveys ranking the trustworthiness of professions in America, journalists are usually seen duking it out for bottom honors with used-car guys and lawyers.

So I didn’t quite understand the fuss when I started getting emails from conservatives complaining when the Kansas City Star ran one of its boilerplate pro-choice editorials under the headline, “Patient privacy must prevail in records sweep.” The editorial rattled on about Johnson County DA Phill Kline’s “vague and far-fetched allegations” against abortion providers. The paper begged Planned Parenthood, one of the clinics under investigation for alleged violation of state laws, "to protect the privacy of patients in the face of Kline’s continuing onslaught."

But really. Who cares? It's not like the Star convinced anybody of anything. Besides, it was obvious from reading the editorial that the Star’s editorialist doesn’t bother reading the papers, either: By now several different judges have found probable cause to look into more than 150 of those “vague” charges against George Tiller and Planned Parenthood, and nothing I read suggested anybody's privacy was at risk (except maybe by Planned Parenthood, where their privacy statement to patients says, "We may use health information about you to contact you in an effort to raise money for our not-for-profit operations.") It should be pretty clear by now, even if all you read are the headlines on the AP wire, that “privacy” is just distracting noise, since as the AP observes, “both sides have come to see enforcement of existing laws as perhaps the most pressing issue with abortion in Kansas.”

The Star didn't run that stuff, of course. It shades its own coverage of abortion in Kansas very carefully. And there’s an obvious reason why that story on the public’s alienation from the press didn’t run in the Star, either. It’s because no newspaper wants to run its own obituary.

The Royal Typewriter Company has called a special meeting of stockholders for June 9 to vote on a proposal to change the present stock of $100 a share... - The New York Times, May 26, 1922.

Royal Typewriter. Remember? Some people working at the Star actually don't, simply because they aren't old enough. Last week, Polaroid announced it was going to stop making Polaroid film. Many won't even notice. That's how it goes in business: your old business gets ambushed in the tall grass of technology, the unthinkable happens quickly, and if you're smart, or just lucky, you find yourself in a whole new business. Old news=old business. An old-fashioned newspaper is like a steam loom in a ready-to-wear world. I mean, nobody truly interested in the news of the day is going to wait until tomorrow’s Star to see what it is.

The new business of the Star and other papers is to provide reassurance to its community of mostly liberal readers who share the paper’s assumptions about the world and how it works. No wonder most people think it's out of touch. Like all mainstream American newspapers, from The New York Times on down to the Wichita Eagle, the Star has decided to create a product of huge interest to a shrinking market but of no interest at all to a growing one.

The consequences are everywhere, for newspapers in general, but for the Star in particular: According to the media analysts at Burrelles Luce, in the last three years, the Kansas City Star has lost nearly 20,000 readers. It once claimed to reach virtually every household in Kansas City. Now it’s lucky if it reaches a third of them. Investors apparently think the Star’s a goner: In that same three year period, the price of a share in McClatchy, the company that owns the Star, has nosedived from $72 to less than a ten-spot. Pretty soon, it’ll be cheaper to buy a share in McClatchy than to buy a copy of the Sunday Star. According to another AP story the news hounds at the Star somehow missed, on the same day they ran their vacuous editorial, McClatchy was eating a $1.47 billion write-down “to reflect further declines in its stock price and a tough outlook for its newspapers.” And actually, that $1.47 billion may have been an understatement: The company’s fourth-quarter loss was almost twice as much per share as a share costs.

You folks working for McClatchy in Kansas City might have been better off if the Star had gone into the 8-track cassette business, because there’s no long-term hope for a newspaper that spends four years and almost $200 million to build a massive building to house the machinery of a dying industry, when what it should have done was rent a room and fill it with a bunch of internet servers and a few computer geeks. 

The Project for Excellence in Journalism began its 2006 annual report by asking, "Will we recall this as the year when journalism in print began to die?" The answer preceded the question. A business that exists solely to give credibility to a minority point of view just isn’t a smart proposition. The Pitch, KC's left-wing tabloid, already does a better job reaching the Star’s market than the Star does, and they do it for a lot less money. Meanwhile, newsroom Darwinists can look past the Pitch to craigslist.com and see the local paper of the future.

So conservatives worked up over the Star’s coverage or its editorials or its story selection or its letters column should just take a shower, pop a soda and relax. A friend of mine, the late George Leinwall, a Joycean scholar and a bibliophile, once advised me against wasting energy on getting angry at a guy who had done me wrong. “His punishment,” Leinwall said, “is his life.” Same with the Star, except for the "life" part.

Somebody very familiar with the abortion battles in Kansas told me the problem's five or six years - or a couple of election cycles - away from a solution, which more or less corresponds to the life expectancy of the Star (although it would be ridiculous to think that the Star will affect the outcome in the least).

Newspapers are over. Why care about them? If you're a conservative, they laugh off your complaints, and if you're a liberal...well, you're not reading this.  Besides, it’s not like anybody will ever have the satisfaction of saying to the Star, “I told you so,” because there’ll be nobody on Grand Boulevard to hear it.