This one’s pretty ridiculous. The Philadelphia Inquirer has hired John Yoo - as in, Torture Yoo - as a columnist. To go with Rick Santorum, I’m sure.

Let me tell you why newspapers do this.

As infamous as the likes of Yoo may be on this side of the aisle, he’s obviously lauded on the right side of the aisle. So this - and Santorum’s column - has become a means by which the Inqurirer says to conservatives: See? We’re catering to you! Fair and balanced! Come on down!

And someone somewhere has this idea that if only newspapers would hire more explicit conservative voices like this, newspapers might be saved.

Conservatives, of course, are eager to encourage this type of thinking. They insist that if only newspapers weren’t so biased, newspapers would be in better fiscal health; that readers are abandoning newspapers because of the bias. But if newspapers would be more conservative - goes this line of reasoning - then they can stop the bleeding.

Newspaper executives, increasingly desperate, then give it a try - because the only other alternative is admitting that the era of newspapers as we have known them is coming to a close. Which I think it is.

That doesn’t mean conservative media can’t be a success; Fox News shows that it obviously can be. But it’s worth asking - why do conservatives in general turn to Fox News instead of, say, CNN?

If conservatives truly wanted balance, they’d watch CNN. But they don’t want this (to be fair, neither does MSNBC’s core audience); what they want is a media that reflects their own point of view, almost exclusively. If Fox News were to hire some liberal commentators and give them equal time with O’Reilly and Hannity - its ratings would plunge.

So sure - if you’re conservative, it’s great if the Inquirer hires Yoo, or Santorum, or whomever. It means you won one; the “liberal media” has caved to your pressure. But it doesn’t mean you’re actually going to read the paper where you didn’t before, re-up a subscription you’d let lapse. If the paper became reliably conservative, rather than “balanced,” that might be a different story. Will Bunch suggests that’s what’s happening at the Inquirer, maybe an attempt to make it into the New York Post of Philadelphia.

Then again, most recent circulation figures show that the Post’s circulation has dropped by 21 percent.

What’s killing newspapers is not the editorial stance, in one direction or the other. What’s killing newspapers is the advent of a technology that makes it easier and more convenient for people to get the information they want, basically for free. We do a lot of dancing around this basic truth, as I suppose the people at IBM’s Selectric unit did when PCs came along. John Yoo’s column won’t stem the Inquirer’s decline. But it could prompt some long-time readers who have been wondering about renewing their circulation to decide against it. In which case - Yoo could hasten the decline, for sure.