Must we crush each other? Really?

BusinessWeek has a bit about the success of the Financial Times. The odd thing to me that jumps out of this article is the notion that the competition must be crushed. I digress to the inevitable quote: "But many suspect that if Job One for a Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is suffocating The New York Times, then Job Two is crushing the FT. (via Romanesko.)"

I'm all for good sportsmanlike tussles, mind you, but crushing other companies strikes me as a bit over the top. Especially when media companies aren't really competing against each other anymore, but against the consumer's time and habits. It's kind of like Johnny sweeping the leg. Shouldn't the bigger victory be for karate teachers everywhere?

In all seriousness, my first acquaintance with destroying the competition, at least in a journalistic sense, came when I interned at the Kenyon Review. No, we weren't throwing down the gauntlet against the Paris Review or the Yale Review. (Sissy publications all!) But our managing editor at the time had recently come from the newspaper business and was delighted to land at the Review. He said his previous job at a Cleveland newspaper involved putting the city's other paper out of commission. And that that just wasn't a very fun task, he told us, or anything that he wanted to do with his career. Hence his defection to the Review.

That always stuck in my mind. I'm all for free market economies and such, but there's a point beyond which too much competition can obliterate the market. And in their haste to maintain their relevance to consumers, today's news outlets shouldn't be racing toward such obliteration.