Burying the lead ...

This is from a Toronto Star story about the Sun Media newspapers withdrawing from the Ontario Press Council, a media supported ethics watchdog. Read the first paragraphs and see what sort of feel they give you for the story.

TORONTO—Sun Media has pulled its newspapers out of the Ontario Press Council, complaining about the “politically correct mentality” of the province’s print-media watchdog.

Glenn Garnett, Sun Media’s vice-president of editorial, sent a letter to the council earlier this week saying that the company’s newspapers were withdrawing their membership, effective immediately.

“The editorial direction of our newspapers, especially our urban tabloids, is incompatible with a politically correct mentality that informs OPC thinking, in the selection of cases it hears, and the rulings it renders,” Garnett wrote.

The Ontario Press Council investigates complaints about some of the largest newspapers in Canada, including the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.

Got a feeling? Now read the fifth paragraph:

The press council has for years overseen 37 dailies, including 27 Sun Media newspapers such as the Toronto Sun, the Kingston Whig-Standard and the London Free Press.

Doesn't that kinda raise a pretty obvious question that any good journalist would raise immediately? It takes the Star all the way to the twelfth paragraph even to acknowledge the issue:

It’s too early to tell what impact the pullout will have on the press council’s finances, he added.

“We’ve been through a pretty vigorous cost control and cost reduction process for the past year and we’ll have to evaluate what the situation is once we get everything, all the numbers put together,” he said.

Do you what, I don't believe him. When 72 percent of your paying customers stop buying from you, the results will be devastating.  That may not be 72 percent of revenue because we don't know how the Council charges it members. And we don't know that because the Toronto Star is a crappy newspaper that let its bias distract it from the story. But it is very hard to see how the council can face this without major cutbacks ans serious layoffs.

And, come on guys, any time you are reporting on your business rival you need to be five times as careful as you normally would be about this sort of thing. The headline here should have been, Future of Press Council in question after Sun Media pull out.

The question is not what effect will it have but can the Press Council even survive.