the collapse of independent newspapers

Independent Newspapers has finally sealed the deal on the sale of its British title The Independent to a Russian KGB agent for £1.

Everything in that statement is the truth.

I reckon the KGB agent got royally screwed.

Buying one of Tony O'Reilly's loss making rags for a £1 is not a bargain.

The Russki was fleeced.

You've got to wonder just how delusional the present Putin regime in Russia is, if they sincerely believe that a readerless newspaper costing 50 million a year to run, could ever influence public opinion in Great Britain.

Expect lots of stories about heroic Pie Eye Steen Yuns battling evil Israelis, and gallant little Iran developing its legitimate right to atomic weapons, and noble (resovietising) Russia quietly absorbing countries on its borders for the greater good of humanity.

So no change there then.

On Thursday, The Irish Times gave a rather roseate hued reportage of this sale along with overall financial results from Independent Newspapers.

The article gave the unmistakeable impression throughout its copious elliptical verbiage, that Independent Newspapers was actually making a profit.

Different results were listed for different divisions.

It was all profits, profits, profits.

Only at the end of the Irish Times article did a little of the truth about Independent Newspapers dismal trading position leak through.

Although Independent Newspapers is claiming to have made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits last year, the company's entire commerical trading position can be summed up by one vital figure.

Losses after tax: 41 million quid.

All the supposed profits boil down to a massive loss.

And here's another interesting figure about Independent Newspapers which The Irish Times omitted for some reason.

Independent Newspapers Debts To Creditors (ie Idiot Banks): Nearly two billion dollars.

That's good squishy.

We could all declare operating profits before tax of hundreds of millions if the corrupt bankrupt idiot banks would give us two billion to play with.

The decline in standards at Independent Newspapers (and their standards were never very high to begin with) was best exemplified last year by the anti Catholic ravings of an habitual cannabis user called Ian O'Doherty who falsely, malignly and maliciously claimed in the Irish Independent that the Catholic Church is a paedophile ring.

The fact that this monstrous lie could be published in a national newspaper, even a near defunct one like the Irish Independent, represents a tremendous blow to the rule of law in the Republic of Ireland.

It also represents the end of our long tradition of civility in public discourse, but that's a relative trifle when measured against the vileness of the calumny being perpetrated by Independent Newspapers against the faith of our fathers.

For more than three decades the Irish Independent and its sister titles have pursued a virulently anti Catholic campaign, turning their hedonist, drug using, sometimes Marxian, sometimes pagan, staff loose in a blatent attempt to humiliate the best and brightest Christian servitors of the Irish people.

Here is the news.

Independent Newspapers, the company that has been declaring record profits for the past three decades, owes billions of pounds to creditors and is losing money across all divisions.

The newspaper group which claimed its anti Catholic pogrom was popular journalism, has, because of its atheistic bigotries, actually attained catastrophic collapses in the numbers of its readers.

There'll be no Russian spies to bail out the rest of their loss making rubbish titles.

It's all but over.

And they're trying to do as much damage to our ancient faith as they can before they sink, giggling over their cocaine and their cannabinoids, beneath the waves.