Peggy Noonan "I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination." (hat tip: Stephen)
And I say it is is the mainstream media becoming unhinged at the loss of absolute power over
the group think in America. And I will tell you something else, they will become more desperate, more vitriolic, vicious and unethical. Oh yeah. Creating faux scandals, smearing good, ethical men. Repeating memes until they become part of the national dialogue. Then "polling" to substantiate their fiction.
From WIRED MAGAZINE:
Big-name political bloggers are banding together to try to bring order to the sometimes-chaotic blogosphere.
Pajamas Media has signed up 70 bloggers including Instapundit.com's Glenn Reynolds, CNBC's Lawrence Kudlow and Pamela from Atlas Shrugs. The site, which will officially launch Nov. 16 under a different name, will highlight different blogs each day alongside top news headlines.
"It will be the best of mainstream media and best of blog media, side by side, sometimes fighting, sometimes agreeing," said Roger Simon, a novelist and blogger who co-founded Pajamas Media.
The site aims to be "a whole online news service of bloggers from all over the world," said Simon. With a list of contributors that reads like a who's who of the political blogosphere, Pajamas Media thinks its daily blog picks will be of a higher quality than automated services like Memeorandum or keyword aggregators like Technorati.
UPDATE: Stephen, thanks
To give journalists such special privileges you have to define who is and who is not a journalist. That is harder to do in the age of the Internet. One reason for the explosion of hostility toward Miller and the Times is the resentment of the blogosphere. Blogging is, if anything, more like the kind of pamphleteering the Framers had in mind when they guaranteed "freedom of the press" than are the New York Times or The Washington Post.
"Capital is often represented as a devouring monster, as the enemy of labor. Thus, a sort of irrational antagonism has been set up between two powers, which, at bottom, have the same origin and the same nature, which co-operate with and aid each other, and which cannot do without each other. When I see labor angry at capital, I seem to see hunger rejecting food. Selected Essays on Political Economy-
Jonah Goldberg "The Press's Superman Complex" 10/26/05
Many putative First Amendment voluptuaries defend their position against the most absurd hypotheticals. My favorite example (as some readers may recall) comes from the columnist Michael Kinsley. A "very distinguished New York Times writer" once told Kinsley that "if the Times ballet critic, heading home after assessing the day's offering of plies and glissades, happens to witness a murder on her way to the Times Square subway, she has a First Amendment right and obligation to refuse to testify about what she saw." Why? Because she's a member of the priestly caste.
UPDATE: October 28th The dinosaur is in hospice
Goldman Sachs: Ad and Revenue Trends Bleak for Newspaper Industry
Editor and Publisher, October 28, 2005
Goldman Sachs issued a chilling note today on trends in the newspaper industry raising severe doubts about near-term ad and revenue growth. It said revenue performance for 2005 will be at its worst level since at least 2001-2002. - Read the whole story...
