Tom Nickels at the City Journal offers a piece on the Philadelphia Weekly changing course and becoming a conservative newspaper.
Philadelphia
Weekly, one of the city’s most venerable
leftist “alternative” newsweeklies, has rocked the local journalism scene with
its announcement that, starting next year, it will provide Philly readers
with a different kind of alternative: it will change its editorial outlook from
hard-liberal to conservative. The news that PW’s chairman and publisher,
Dan McDonough, Jr., was doing a 180-degree reversal of its editorial direction
struck most Philadelphians as a fantasy straight out of The Onion. I received several emails from fellow
journalists, asking, “Is this real?”
… In
recent years, PW’s cover stories and columns have pushed wokeness so
aggressively that the paper sometimes resembled an Antifa broadside. Writers
branded “conservative” found it hard to get published there.
Ironically, PW was no longer an alternative weekly in the
sense of being different from any other newspaper in the city, because its
views mirrored many of the left-wing arguments found in The Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere. PW just pushed harder.
“We
have always been the alternative voice in Philadelphia,” says McDonough now,
regarding his decision to rebrand the paper. “That audience has changed over
the years, and, in 2020, conservatives and people who are angry and fed up with
an inept city government don’t really have a voice here. To continue our mission,
we had to change.” PW’s chief revenue officer, Ed Lynes, told Philadelphia Magazine that, in the city, it is
“conservatives who no longer have a voice. If you oppose a socialist and
intrusive government, your views are rejected by the city’s mainstream media.”
You can
read the rest of the piece via the below link:
https://www.city-journal.org/leftist-philadelphia-weekly-moves-right
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