Why doesn’t McClatchy’s Raleigh N&O run Mark Steyn?

McClatchy News Company’s stock’s down almost 90% in the last 5 years. Ad revenue is falling through the floor.

McClatchy's Raleigh News & Observer’s circulation’s flat or worse in an area with a strong economy and a 33% population growth since 2000.

News business technology shifts are part of what’s hurting McClatchy and the N&O.

But both the company and newspaper are turgidly liberal/leftist; and that’s driving away a lot of readers who want their news fair and balanced, and something better on the editorial page than the usual liberal/leftist propagandizing with an occasional breath of grace and sense provided by Charles Krauthammer, George Will and Rick Martinez, the N&O’s only center-right news or editorial columnist.

So wouldn’t it be smart for the N&O to carry Mark Steyn’s column?

He’s one of the sharpest, funniest, most literate, and most insightful columnists out there. He’s also one of the most popular, with a following throughout the Anglophone world.

Here’s the first part of Steyn’s most recent column - - -

"Someone wins, someone doesn't win, that's life," Nancy Kopp, Maryland's treasurer, told The Washington Post. "But women don't want to be totally dissed." She was talking about her political candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. "Healing The Wounds Of Democrats' Sexism," as the Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy.

Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard to determine whether Sen. Clinton's presidential hopes fell victim to party and media sexism.

How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver's license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neosegregationist race-baiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates.

"On this Memorial Day," said Barack Obama last Monday, "as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes – and I see many of them in the audience here today."
Hey, why not? In Obama's Cook County, Ill., many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It's not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too. …

The rest of the column’s here.

It would be smart for the N&O to carry Steyn, but I doubt it will.

But there's good news for N&O readers. They can always find Steyn on the Internet.

And that’s one more reason why readers are leaving the N&O and advertisers are looking elsewhere to spend their money.