My friend David Carr touches on two issues in his NYT column today on the problems in newspapers: The contempt that a new wave of business-minded owners, like Sam Zell, have toward the journalistic missions of their new charges, and the departure of older and presumably more experienced staffers in buyouts.

For the first, I think a distinction needs to be made between the ownership of the papers and the management of them we’re seeing. An issue too-seldom focused on is the debt the companies are now desperately trying to service. The Tribune company, which owns the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun and many other papers, has at least $12 billion owing. I haven’t read yet that any of these papers are losing money—most, actually, just aren’t minting it the way they did for so many years.

What the papers have now they didn’t have before—I mean, besides the falling circ and advertising—is that debt.

It’s the price the company paid for the privilege of having Sam Zell own it. It’s one thing for him to have bought the place and undermined its quality: In theory, he bought it and he can do with it what he likes, contempt for the mission or no. But there is something unnecessary, almost decadent, about the current situation, in which he didn’t precisely buy it, but borrowed the money to get control, and is now  strangling an institution with his hubris.

Now, all that said, the other factor too seldom mentioned is the part these papers played digging their own graves, including (and this never gets mentioned) the staffs themselves. Carr talks about the loss of institutional memories and experience that the buyouts are costing these operations. That’s definitely true, but another hard truth about the industry shouldn’t go unsaid, which is that there’s a lot of people at these papers who don’t do a lot of work, or who haven’t done anything to help them adjust to the new realities of the profession—which, let’s be honest, have been staring them in the face for more than a decade.

I had to laugh as I read Carr’s column when I read this remark from a media analyst: “Circulation declines were deeper in the last period, and I have to say that I think it has to do with the quality problems from cuts.”

What about the quality problems before the cuts?

As a press critic in Chicago, and then in San Francisco, I gleefully charted the way both local papers in each city at various times didn’t employ a pop music writer worthy of the name. This was back when the papers were minting money as usual. It was not-that-subtle a signal what the paper thought about new generations of readers.

I think it’s a fallacy, incidentally, to ascribe the papers’ financial stability to things like editorial quality; they have traditionally made that money off their monopoly hold on a social tradition. But certainly the contempt the papers often showed toward their customers hastened along the decline once it started coming, and it certainly should be noted now, as the papers whine about being buffeted by winds everyone knew was coming.

The Chicago Tribune, for example, was always quick to editorialize against the public interest when it came to Tribune Company profits. One of my favorites was a editorial campaigning for relaxed TV ownership restrictions by the FCC. “Far from consolidating, America’s mass media are fragmenting, and at a cost to society,” the paper wrote from on high. “Despite their faults, the media provide a commonality of experience, a unifying thread. Without strong voices to bind us together, there’s danger that we may splinter as a society into small racial, ethnic, economic and other groups.”

A multiplicity of voices is of course democracy in action, and solitary strong voices are an invitation to fascism. I always though that that was a strange position for a newspaper to take, and I’ve always remembered that editorial as a glimpse of the devils who sat behind the paper’s facade.

Most readers are smart, though, and they could ignore such stuff. It was harder to ignore the fact that a lot of what the papers published and dumped on their porch each day just wasn’t very interesting. Over the years, too many staffs had the initiative beaten out of them by layers of bureaucracy.

Here’s a story, anecdotal but true. I interviewed a few times, some years ago, at a fairly well known metro daily. At the time, I had noticed in Billboard that Clear Channel (this was before it changed its name to Live Nation), the concert promotion arm of it, was being sued by a local suburb for not paying its taxes on a concert shed.

It wasn’t a big story or anything, but Clear Channel was pretty well known back then for brutish behavior like that. Here was a company that was raking in concert bucks from local consumers, charging exorbitant fees for everything from parking to nachos, and slapping ads on everything in the venue that wasn’t physically moving—and it was cheating on its taxes in the small town where its venue was located. You had folks’ interest in Clear Channel, the good-government aspects, the pop culture angle, and the potential for at least a little “Hey didja see the story about …” action.

Anyway, one time when I was interviewing at the paper over the course of the day I brought it up. I mentioned the story to the paper’s pop critic, and said he should do the story. I mentioned it to the paper’s arts editor. I told the editor of the paper about it, too, and the managing editor.

I don’t need to tell you that none of the four followed up. And again, this was a suit. It didn’t require any investigative reporting, just a visit to the courthouse, a quick interview with aggrieved city officials, and few calls to Clear Channel that the company wouldn’t have bothered to respond to.

Again, it’s anecdotal evidence, but it’s a powerful example of a major contributing factor to the decline of newspapers: The thoroughgoing timidity—nay, the positive lassitudinousness, if that’s a word—of their staffs. The paper continued to do interviews and stories promoting the acts that played the venue; those were fed to the operation by publicists. But it didn’t have the wherewithal to do actual news.

Now, this is a side issue to Carr’s point—the same timidity that produced that permeating languor extended to new hires, so it’s not necessarily true that some of the younger, cheaper talent will be any more aggressive, or even if it does that the remaining timid editors won’t drain the energy out of them soon enough. But let’s not forget that buyouts are specificially designed to get deadwood out the door.