I'm goofing a bit here on the beloved, and simplistic, right-wing meme that's been popular for years now as big city daily newspapers continue to shed readers. The claim is that newspapers are shrinking because they're so darn liberal; because they've lost touch with their readers.

Forget about the Internet or how free media has transformed our culture. Readers are canceling their subscriptions because there are too many liberal columnists! And hey, that's how the marketplace works.

What's so ironic is that it turns out it's the WashTimes and the New York Post, two unabashedly conservative newspapers, are losing perhaps the most readers of any newspaper. Both dailies have cost their owners billions of dollars in losses. Indeed, the owners don't even pretend the papers could earn a profit in the marketplace. Instead the dailies act as subsidized conservative workfare projects, paid for in the name of giving the owners a (money-losing) media platform.

Increasingly though, the news for the WashTimes and New York Post is getting so grim that perhaps even the Rev. Sung Myung Moon and Rupert Murdoch, respectively, are starting to have second thoughts. The Post, for instance, has lost nearly 200,000 readers since 2007. And at the Moonie Times, executives were swept out of office this week in the wake of more dismal financial numbers.

If only the dailies weren't so conservative, maybe they wouldn't be losing so much money.

UPDATED: It's going from bad to worse for the WashTimes and NYPost today. See here and here.