The Miami Herald is now begging for handouts in order to keep their special brand of “journalism” alive. The move comes as no surprise, it’s long been known the paper’s local community has lost interest in what the Herald has to say, and it’s advertisers have lost confidence in the newspaper’s ability to influence readers.
Newspapers like the Herald have been in financial trouble for years. Though advertisers have been pulling the plug for a while, the panicked, coronavirus-caused economic slowdown has exacerbated the problem to the point they have now resorted to begging for cash from local residents to help support the Coronavirus Local News Fund.
So far, under 200 people have felt motivated to donate to their cause, and the Herald has raised less than $14,000, just a fraction of their stated goal of $350,000 in donations to keep the newsroom alive. The Herald has tried everything from installing paywalls to flat out making stuff up.
Over the past few months, the Herald’s reporters all but abandoned any pretense of objectivity and openly embraced a liberal, big-labor agenda when they voted overwhelmingly to unionize their workforce. As we reported at the time, a unionized newsroom is a tacit admission that they lean leftward politically: over 90 percent of all union donations nationally wind up in the coffers of the Democrat party and its politicians.
It’s little wonder that Miami residents, the majority of which are either registered Republicans or are registered voters with no party affiliation (NPA), are tired of reading the partisan tripe published by the Herald. And there’s been no shortage of that lately.
Earlier this month, Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago posted her thoughts on Twitter about Florida’s decision to reopen beaches, unable to hide her contempt for Republicans, calling them “stupid” and in a subsequent tweet, suggesting it would be just fine if coronavirus killed them:
She later deleted the tweet, but not before someone captured it and the story went national.
Then, last Friday, the Herald published a fake news story pretending that Governor Ron DeSantis was engaged in a cover-up of COVID-19 nursing home deaths. But the sensational headline didn’t match the facts.
The week before that the Herald published a false story proclaiming “Florida’s deadliest day.” That one gained national prominence as sites like the Drudge Report proclaimed the fake news long before the truth was discovered – that in fact, the stats the Herald relied on included previously unreported weekend deaths that were simply not reported until the following Monday. Ho-hum.
But the Herald’s coronavirus panic has shaded their news coverage since the get go. In late March, when coronavirus cases were still just trickling in, the Herald’s editorial board begged DeSantis to “give a damn,” lamenting that Florida wasn’t reacting in the same way to the crisis as New York or California. Six weeks later, it’s obvious why Florida’s governor started throwing shade on panicked media outlets like the Herald.
Ironically, the false headlines and fear-mongering over coronavirus by the Herald may have helped accelerated it’s own demise.