If you’re a Republican and you haven’t yet cancelled your newspaper, you are missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime. Between the Internet and the gathering clouds of recession, most newspapers today are in serious financial difficulty. A few thousand more angry Republicans canceling the paper might not have had much impact a few years ago. Today you might have the distinction of participating in the final Drive Toward Receivership for your own local chapter of the Associated Press.

If the election of 2008 did not provide you with enough reasons to want to see massive layoffs in the newspaper industry, perhaps this will strike your fancy:

Tina Fey is the entertainer of the year? You betcha. Fey was voted The Associated Press’ Entertainer of the Year, an annual honor chosen by newspaper editors and broadcast producers across the country.

Tina Fey is a talented person. If the Academy of Comedic Arts and Sciences had given her such an award, I would not be writing this. However, the people who voted to give her this particular award are the ones writing, editing, and selecting our news. And their selection confirms what we already know about what goes on in their heads. And that in turn tells us that we Republicans cannot expect to be treated fairly in any news account, anywhere, at any time, so long as these people are in charge of writing and editing it.

The ‘newspaper editors and broadcast producers across the country’ do not even realize that they spend their days insulting and angering a good half of the people who pay their salaries. Or perhaps they do know and they don’t care. Regardless, the only way to ‘reform’ the news industry in this country in the hopes of making it fair to us and the people who represent our values, is to get virtually everyone who works there now fired or laid off. Until the sort of people who think that ridiculing Sarah Palin is the height of hilarity are removed from positions where they get to select what’s “news” and what isn’t, we can only expect more Chicago machine pols with halos decorating the covers of our news magazines, and ever-more reasons to tear our hair out over the blatancy of the Democratic Party activism coming from our press.

Those of us who are not Democrats have no reason to be funding Democratic Party activism. If you still subscribe to a daily newspaper, then you are helping to fund the Associated Press and the Democratic Party activists who write and edit the news that most voters rely on to make decisions. That’s insane. So stop. Cancel the paper.