That what all that tiered-Internet BS is really about. Not about money, or ownership, or capitalism, but about getting inconvenient people to shut up.

Posted December 4, 2006 10:17 PM by JonathanMoeller

Tell me about this tiered-Internet BS.

Posted December 4, 2006 10:23 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Ah. Patrick tells me it's the set of issues otherwise known as Net Neutrality. Yes. Much too good for the common people.

Posted December 4, 2006 10:34 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Teresa: The issue is commonly called "Net neutrality"; it's been heavily covered in both the media (which is against it) and blogs such as BoingBoing and its ilk, which are for it.

I recommend looking for references on the topic is Wetmachine, an excellent blog on telecom and related subjects. I especially recommend the articles written by Harold Feld, under the title Tales of the Sausage Factory.

Posted December 4, 2006 10:38 PM by Bruce Adelsohn

Theresa writes: "Based on my own experience, I’d say the answer to Digby’s question is: yes."

Based on my own experience - 20 years as a working newspaper reporter - I'd say the answer is most definitely yes.

Why? Because for a certain number of journalists, knowing stuff they can't tell the public is fun.

When they're nobodies just getting started in the hinterlands, it makes them feel like insiders, even if the only insider scoop they have is about which city council members are screwing around on their spouses or which high school football coach has an alcohol problem.

Naive reporters stumble onto this kind of thing and want to write stories about it; their editors slap them down because they don't have sufficient evidence, and nobody wants to risk a libel suit. So instead of writing about it, they tell each other (newsrooms are awash in the dirty little secrets of the small-town power elite).

It makes them feel important, in the know, and that's a feeling that's easy to get hooked on. By the time they've moved up the food chain to become nationally prominent journalists, they can't live without it.

Reason No. 1,243 why I left the news business ...

Posted December 4, 2006 10:41 PM by Pat Kight

Oops. That should be "in" Wetmachine, of course.

And, tangentially, I blogged about three instances of truth in media myself recently, all of which give me hope that we're not totally snowed under with bovine excrement. But oh, the massive weight to clear away!

Posted December 4, 2006 10:41 PM by Bruce Adelsohn

Why is Plato's Republic a work much liked by the elite in the media? Plato lays out the ideal elitist world-view. Most of us obey, a few enlightened minds do our thinking for us, and the police keep the masses in line. It's much easier if the debate is framed by a few 'wise' heads, with perhaps some comic relief in the form of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to disguise the fact that most of the media has a gamut of opinions from A to B.

Real journalism in this country gets done by people at the margins. In magazines like Mother Jones and The Nation, on the web in blogs like this one, but certainly not in the MSM.

Posted December 4, 2006 10:45 PM by Fragano Ledgister

One thing that I don't understand about the Valerie Plame scandal is why Robert Novak, the man who actually committed the crime of outing her as a CIA agent, isn't in jail. Certainly, everyone in the chain of leaks should be in jail too, but it seems like Novak got a teflon shield or something.

Posted December 4, 2006 10:56 PM by Earl Cooley III

Here is the entry in Glenn Beck's file at MediaMatters.Org that I tipped to them before CNN hired him. I've yet to see him top that one for sheer viciousness.

After devoting a portion of the October 6 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show to discussing pending legislation that would prohibit "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of detainees held by the U.S. government, Glenn Beck interviewed a caller who claimed to have worked as an "intelligence officer" and to have "extracted intelligence" from U.S.-held prisoners by torturing them. The caller said his preferred methods of torture included burning the retinas of prisoners' eyes with high-powered halogen lamps and blowing out prisoners' eardrums with high-pressure water and air. He also claimed to have known "a contractor that did drilling on live teeth." After hearing the caller describe these torture techniques, Beck responded, "I've got to tell you, I appreciate your service." During the interview, Beck asked the caller if he ever had trouble sleeping at night. When the caller answered, "No," Beck responded, "Good for you." He later added, "[W]hen all is said and done, I'm glad people like you are on our side."

Posted December 4, 2006 11:02 PM by j h woodyatt

I would love to hear you talk about each and every one of the topics listed in the penultimate paragraph, separately or together. I hope you take that as a list of posts to work on.

By the way, terrific post.

Posted December 4, 2006 11:12 PM by Stephen Frug

I know a number of people in various levels of the government, particularly in Florida and I was told that everyone within the political arena had a pretty good idea of what Mark Foley had been up to for a very long time. When the scandal broke, it certainly wasn't news to them.

Posted December 4, 2006 11:19 PM by Jude

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with news media having a bit of the "inside scoop" us proles don't get to have. Some of it is gossip, not the kind of thing that needs to be or should be spread around. The problem is when, as Pat said above, journalists get hooked on the idea of having those secrets or on the idea of believing they're somehow better for knowing them. Because then, I think, they stop being able to distinguish the personal (the football coach gets drunk every weekend and hangs out, depressed, in his house--not an ideal situation, but not the business of the whole town, necessarily) and the dangerous (the football coach gets drunk and rapes cheerleaders). (And of course, the rules are a little different for politicians--I still don't think that character in every respect is a necessary thing for politics, but it has become so in this country, and politicians know that going in.)

Posted December 4, 2006 11:20 PM by Melanie S.

You know, up 'til last year when I linked to it, this was on the internets. Now it's on the Wayback.

Jonathan Alter explains to a bunch of kids at his alma mater prep school about real-world politics, and specifically the character of one George W. Bush.

Hear a lot of that from Newsweek, did we? Um, not so much.

We did hear rather a lot about Democrats and their character issues, though, didn't we.

Might coulda had to do with the fact that he really, really wanted a war and if the middlebrows who read his magazine had any idea who was in the White House he might not have gotten it?

It's The Last Hurrah without the charm.

Posted December 4, 2006 11:23 PM by julia

Julia, mind if I incorporate that into the main post? It's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Posted December 4, 2006 11:26 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

not at all.

Posted December 4, 2006 11:30 PM by julia

Okay, you and your link are now in the main post.

Posted December 4, 2006 11:45 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I noticed a funny thing happening over the first few years of this century that I wish I'd kept track of. During Dubya's 2000 campaign, I frequently saw journalistic coverage talking about how he'd been a fuck-up in his youth (not using that phrase, of course), but now he was all grown-up and serious.

Then, after he took office, stories about how he'd been a lightweight in the campaign, but now that he was actually in the White House, now he was all grown-up and serious.

Then, after 9-11, it was about how the first months of his administration were sloppy and dumb, but now that his country needed him, he was all grown-up and serious.

Either it was just bullshit and they were covering up his incompetence, or (as I thought at the time) the press corps desperately needed to believe that we couldn't have an incompetent president, especially in a time of crisis.

At least I haven't seen any stories like that recently.

Posted December 4, 2006 11:47 PM by Avram

Huh, you're right. Those tapered off, never to be seen again. I wonder whether that happened as people realized that he was hardly going to be using any of his father's consiglieri in his administration. Everbody had been assuming he would.

I don't think they believed for long that we couldn't have an incompetent chief executive. I think they got depressed at the realization that that was exactly what we had.

Posted December 4, 2006 11:53 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Personally, my favorite part of the story was this

Mr. Alter said he and other reporters enjoyed riding with Sen. McCain on his swung through New Hampshire during the primary, because Sen. McCain was so accessible, chatting for hours with reporters.

"He earned his good press honestly, not cynically."

Posted December 4, 2006 11:57 PM by julia

I remember two occasions on which NPR folks asked GOP stalwarts attending events on the campaign trail whether they were worried by persistent reports that Bush wasn't the brightest bulb in the light fixture, and didn't have much experience with much of anything.

The answer, on both occasions: "Well . . . he'll have good people around him."

This suggests that a lot of folks knew that Bush weren't no learned up much.

Knew, but blew it off, because, gosh, the guy was sincere and straight shooting.

God, I'm so fucking depressed.

Posted December 5, 2006 12:05 AM by Stefan Jones

After 2000, 2002 and 2004, you want journalists, or anybody, to have greater faith in the electorate?

Posted December 5, 2006 12:08 AM by Rasselas

Bravissima.

The good news is that the press remains a mixed bag-- but for the Grey Lady, WaPo and a few others (generally newspapers; t.v. and radio are just about worthless), we wouldn't know what has gone on in Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, the ghost prisons, the "extraordinary renditions", the warrantless surveillance, or all of the other wonderful treats Dear Leader and our beloved government have for us... As compromised as it is, the Congress, and much of the courts, have rolled over and died in protecting us from tyranny in the name of "fighting terrorism".

The bad news, alas, is legion... pretty much what you have said... on steroids.

Posted December 5, 2006 12:12 AM by the talking dog

#21 - Yes, dammit, YES. If, in 2000, 2002, and 2004, the bloody journalists had decided to help people find out the *facts* about politics, instead of saying "ooh, Republicans are the Defenders of Our Country, and ha ha, look at those funny-looking/wooden/stupid/insane Democrats", we wouldn't have HAD the last six years of lunatics running things.

Posted December 5, 2006 12:17 AM by mjfgates

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Thank you for summing this all up, Teresa.

Posted December 5, 2006 12:25 AM by Clifton Royston

#21 -

Yes.

We make our own beds and we make our own graves. In the end, trusting or not trusting the people isn't about whether the people will handle some issue better or worse---they won't. It's about whether we in our government enshrine and make sacred, or dismiss and vilify, the concepts of trust and openness and the worthiness thereof.

Put another way, a government that does not trust attracts to its service those for whom honor is a term of little practical value; they then seek to employ their talent for subterfuge and doublethink even when it is not the best policy.

Rebecca

Posted December 5, 2006 1:24 AM by Rebecca Borgstrom

Maybe people don't need journalists to help them see through the lying promises of people like George W. Bush.

Maybe people know the "facts" and vote for Republicans because they like the violence that Republicans reliably deliver.

Posted December 5, 2006 1:44 AM by Rasselas

Yes, and for these reasons, thank you for blogging.

It's not a coincidence that printing newspapers became relatively cheap and easy right around the times of the American and French revolutions. I'm not a history geek, but I think it's safe to say that the ability of an elite class to control public opinion took a big blow, and the ruling class widened considerably.

Of course, the people breaking in are generally all too happy to leave behind the populism that got them power, and form a new, slightly less elite but still pretty elite ruling class, and that's what we've had since.

But that's cracking at the seams. It may be 'just a bunch of Internet bloggers', but I can count a lot of stories that the media chose to ignore, and the bloggers didn't, that turned into real stories. Like Abu Ghraib, Rather's memo, Valerie Plame, electronic voting irregularities... the list keeps growing. They have already lost their monopoly on the filter, and can never get it back.

I think we're in for some interesting times, very soon, as a result.

And this revolution requires a lot less than it takes to own a printing press and get circulation. The circle widens again.

And it is good.

Posted December 5, 2006 2:00 AM by Kirby

The most important part of your post is at the beginning:

the news media have sided with the privileged elite, a class to which you almost certainly don’t belong.

It's worse: the people in the news media are the priviledged elite and we have multimillionaires like Tom Friedman shaping public opinion...

Now of course most journalists are not rich, but most journalists do depend for their livelyhood on staying in favour with people who are rich. If it isn't their editor or publisher, its their advertisers or government contacts...

Chomsky and Herman, in Manufacturing Consent described the pressures news media are under eighteen years ago; since then it has only gotten worse as the trends they wrote about have continued....

Posted December 5, 2006 3:00 AM by Martin Wisse

The problem with blogging is that it sets up its own elite. Yes, it may be a more egalitarian elite because it is made up of people not "in the know" and therefore more likely to broadcast information that has been withheld from the public, but it is still an elite. To blog implies that one has a computer, and internet connection, and the time to read and engage in online discussion.

There are other considerations, too. The list of political blogs is in the hundreds. How does one tell which blogs are worthy of interest, and which blogs focus on areas you're interested in? Does anyone have enough time to do all that reading?

Then there is the question of who knows about political weblogs and cares enough to find them. Someone who uses the web primarily to check e-mail, read the Yahoo! headlines, and search for chicken soup recipes isn't going to be reading Kos.

Bloggers aren't the media elite that likes to keep its secrets, but that doesn't stop them from being a self-selected group. A fractured self-selecting group. The success of the New York Times is only partially predicated on its reporting. The rest is on the fact that everyone reads it. Until there is some form of blog consolidation, bloggers will have less power than the MSM. We don't have the reach, and we don't have the convenience. Once these problems are overcome, blogs will rule the world, and politicians will run for cover.

Posted December 5, 2006 3:25 AM by Luthe

#1 and #4, Jonathan and Bruce - The Net Neutrality debate was what first came to my mind, as well. When major news stories are breaking on YouTube, and raw footage airs without that carefully contextualized spin to tell us how to interpret the highly produced snippet--then suddenly the idea of an informed populace has some juice again.

When that informed populace has a voice--a voice growing in strength, at that--and they can find each other and establish a public conversation, without the corporate media in charge of decisions about who gets to join the debate...little wonder there are entrenched and institutionalized media outlets that perceive a very real threat. Little wonder the internet is under attack from the older, better-established communications institutions, and not just in America. Power isn't easily relinquished.

Blogging makes a real and meaningful exchange of ideas possible, again.

...And I get some of the coolest recipes that way, too.

Posted December 5, 2006 3:46 AM by Mac

This is why I get my news on the internet. Hell, I live in Albuquerque and the daily's favorite columnists are Low-Cal Thomas and Charles SourKrauthammer.

Posted December 5, 2006 6:21 AM by Serge

#31, Serge, I get my news from the internet, too--and I try remind myself to add a pinch of salt, when the occasion seems to call for it.

The problem, of course, is that the last six years have been such a study in lunacy that it's hard to actually assimilate that these weird and horrible things are real.

Luthe, #29 - It's awfully easy for me to be all, "gee whiz, the internet is so cool!" and forget that there are some drawbacks built into the rampant disorganization. I just don't know as consolidation and organization are really the answer. I'm not thrilled that Google bought YouTube--every time something like that happens, it reduces the marvelous diversity available. Also, I worry that it ultimately reduces our choices as end-users, both in terms of what's available, and in terms of what technology will be explored first/fastest/at all.

And I'm not all that sure something like BloggerNews is any answer, either.

Posted December 5, 2006 7:46 AM by Mac

the last six years have been such a study in lunacy

As someone pointed out, Mac, it's hard to do satire when reality is as bizarre as a spoof from the Onion.

Posted December 5, 2006 8:31 AM by Serge

Excellent post. There are times I keep thinking, is it me, am I the only one that thinks there is something wrong? Of course, as Douglas Adams had Slarty B. say, "no, that's just common, everyday paranoia."

Who ever thought that we would all have to be Kremlinologists with our own country. Fortunately I was well schooled in that skill, although sometimes I have to remind myself that my tin-foil hat is only figurative and not put on a real one.

#26 Rasselas, reminds me of the quote from Mr. World in Serenity, "You only bring me the best violence."

Posted December 5, 2006 8:34 AM by Steve Buchheit

Teresa: Thank you.

Posted December 5, 2006 8:49 AM by Beth

Wasn't that Mr Universe?

/nit-pickery

Posted December 5, 2006 9:18 AM by Sus

#36, Sus, it most certainly was, may bad. My tin-foil hat wasn't picking up a clean signal. You can't stop the signal.

Posted December 5, 2006 9:41 AM by Steve Buchheit

It's interesting that many conservatives feel almost exactly the same way about the media and about the political elite. I know, I know - how can they, when that's who they really are, etc.

But you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone on the right who trusts much that comes from CBS, the New York Times, Reuters, etc., for many of the exact reasons that this post details. These people are similarly estranged from what are seen as "the only opinions worth having by decent people", decent people being defined as (e.g.) reporters at the above outlets, presidents of Ivy universities, commentators at NPR and other upstanding types.

This persists even with Bush in office, Scalia on the Supreme Court, and all the other examples of overwhelming-conservative-control that I'm sure folks here can adduce. Whether this is nuts is a topic for discussion, but it does exist. And it does so to the degree that Teresa's post would (without the specific examples of, say, Glenn Beck) be perfectly acceptable to readers of "The Corner" at National Review Online.

I should know - I'm conservative myself, and I feel like throwing things when an article in the Times, a piece on NPR, or a remark by Hillary Clinton or any of a long list of elected or appointed officials goes the mode of: "We know what's best for you - don't trouble your little head, and if you were as good as we are you'd think the way we do, anyway."

Posted December 5, 2006 9:58 AM by Derek Lowe

Superb. Thank you Teresa, again.

Reading this, I dug through some links to find that great document of Washington press independence: Sally Quinn's In Washington, That Letdown Feeling in the WaPo. This was her attempt to show why Washington was shocked, shocked by Bill Clinton, while most of the rest of the country desperately wanted to move on. It lists one politician or reporter after another pledging fealty to the DC establishment, including David Broder, the Dean of Washington Journalism (Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.).

"He came in here and he trashed the place," says Washington Post columnist David Broder, "and it's not his place."

Much earlier in my life, I committed journalism for a few years, for money. In that time I got to know some great reporters working away in big jobs and small, and tried to learn from them. But I also discovered that too many of my colleagues became reporters for the same reasons that others went into politics or show business. (I changed that from "and" to "or" but I wonder if I should change it back. Hmm.) It was not just that you got to be friends with some of the people you cover -- you do. But these folks had this big sucking need to be recognized as important that distorted the rest of their lives. If we can say that anyone who wants to be president should not be, what about someone who desperately wants to be a network anchor or newspaper columnist?

Posted December 5, 2006 10:00 AM by Claude Muncey

I really don't want to start a flamewar, but some of the right has been saying this for some time. They've been calling it "the new medievalism" based on this article.

Posted December 5, 2006 10:07 AM by Chris Gerrib

I am really grateful for this blog. In the internet world of screaming craziness, you and Patrick make persuasive and compelling arguments in a way that allows folks to change their minds without feeling like losers in some kind of zero-sum political pissing match.

I consider myself well read with regard to current events, but it was on Making Light that I was persuaded to abandon the Green Party before it was such an obvious choice, and it was here that I've learned about astroturf and other forms of information manipulation. Thanks for elucidating this in a way that makes sense, and not just blaring the usual "Mainstream Media is a conspiracy blah blah!"

Posted December 5, 2006 10:18 AM by Sean Bosker

Derek Lowe, #38: nobody -- be they right wing or left wing -- likes being taken for a fool by a smug, patronizing self-appointed elite.

I'd argue that the SPSAE (or whatever else you want to call it) isn't left-wing or right-wing in the traditional sense: rather, they're at one pole of a political axis of discourse that most of us aren't aware of. The key issue that separates us from them is control. They're the natural heirs to the pre-1914 elites, and they're trying to occupy the power vacuum left by the dissolution of the monarchical system. Meet the new boss: same as the old boss.

(And you wonder why history is so haphazardly taught in schools around the world?)

Posted December 5, 2006 10:21 AM by Charlie Stross

Damn: replace "They're the natural heirs" with "They see themselves as the natural heirs".

Posted December 5, 2006 10:22 AM by Charlie Stross

Of all the unmentioned topics you mentioned, I am most curious about this one:

"The unexpected emergence of the multi-author project."

(That's if you're taking requests.)

Posted December 5, 2006 10:56 AM by MoXmas

I recently had a rather rude awakening -- I was in England, and had occasion to watch both the BBC and SKY News channels every day for 10 days. I was in London when Alexander Litvinenko died, and comparing the coverage between the two outlets was a real eye-opener.

SKY seemed to be covering it in more of a reasoned fashion, whereas the BBC was all screaming headlines and nuclear hysteria. And then a few days later, a custody case involving families in Pakistan and Scotland was settled and the BBC dropped the Litvinenko story like a hot potato and it was All Custody, All The Time, whereas one could barely find a mention of that case outside the crawl on SKY. The Beeb was obviously going for the cheap attention-grabbing headline, at the expense of reporting anything that might actually matter in the grand scheme of things. I could only assume that this is their MO in general.

I would have expected SKY to be the FOX of the UK and the BBC the more obviously credible news source, not the other way around.

I guess what I'm saying is, now I know for sure that America is not alone in its over-reliance upon a suspect media. I've been religiously watching the BBC World News on Channel 13 every weeknight (that and "The Daily Show" have been my TV news sources for years). Knowing that I'm not necessarily improving my lot by doing so saddens me.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:12 AM by meredith

Charlie@43 --- actually, if you meant to discuss the elites in this country, you were right the first time; the United States has quite a few families that have accrued and maintained influence for several generations, sometimes in the public eye, sometimes not. (As there's no formal aristocracy, the name for this class, on the surprisingly rare occasions that people choose to name it, is simply "Old Money").

Examples right now: in the public eye there's a Rockefeller in the Senate, while farther away, there's the influence of Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon fortune, who funds lots and lots of right-wing "think tanks" and other sorts of activism. Both fortunes predate 1914, as do those of the DuPonts (financiers of General Motors, and the viciously anti-Roosevelt "liberty league"), Roosevelts (a big deal in New York when it was still called New Amsterdam), and many others.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:13 AM by "Charles Dodgson"

A year or so before the 1992 primaries, my wife, who was then working as a special assistant to one of America's most powerful labor leaders, heard two of the politicals in the office discussing the prospects of the potential candidates. Clinton's name came up, and the reply was "Yeah, he's good; too bad he has an adultery problem."

And all through the campaign we held our collective breaths, waiting for the "Clinton's black baby" story to surface, and wondered why it never did. Our insiderhood was limited enough that the obvious answer (a retaliatory counterstory that would annihilate Bush Senior if the first story was launched) never went beyond guesswork. But I'm sure that there are thousands who do know.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:14 AM by theophylact

This is a wonderful post. I'd thought of mentioning Broder's "trashed the place" quote, but Claude Muncey already included it.

A nit to pick, however. It was the Miami Herald who broke the Gary Hart story, even though other outlets were sniffing around. Cohen and his cohorts weren't actually the author of Hart's exposure, despite the credit he claimed at Yale. (I suppose MH's DC-beat reporters may be considered DC insiders, but I don't know and if somebody can clarify that point, I'd be happy to be corrected.)

Posted December 5, 2006 11:17 AM by lasko

Seems to me Dick Meyer's piece is just an attempt to curry favor with the new Democratic powers in Washington.

Or, perhaps, he's outright prostrating himself before them.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:19 AM by Jon H

perhaps, he's outright prostrating himself before them

Which brings to my mind the scene in Animal House where Kevin Bacon is about to be initiated into the campus's posh fraternity. He is ordered to assume "the position" then gets paddled on the posterior. He then asks: "May I have another one, sir?"

Posted December 5, 2006 11:24 AM by Serge

I bet if you go back to late 2000/early 2001, after the Bush 'win' had been settled, you'd find a similar story by Dick Meyer casting aspersions on the Clinton/Gore administrations.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:29 AM by Jon H

It's not too early to nominate this post for a Koufax, is it?

I am reminded of the time the Washington Post's Federal Page reported on Poppy Bush's mistress' new, six-figure government job. It was pre-internets, so none but the insiders got the joke when the Post said something along the lines of 'she served under Bush in a variety of positions'.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:48 AM by Ronit

It seems everyone in the press corps had the poop about Bush Sr.'s extramarital goings-on yet it never made the papers. Must be the fringe benefits of having been head of the CIA.

I was on the road when the invasion of Iraq began, and where I found myself we had television news from the BBC. As I recall the troops were having a tougher go of it on the BBC than on home-grown news outlets.

Disclaimer: I was a television reporter for five years. Whee!

Posted December 5, 2006 11:49 AM by Richard Brandt

Possibly tangental, but this conflict's everywhere here's a quote from the nerdsphere version:

Many in positions of power really do not like the web, for a variety of social, technical, and economic reasons. They may use web technologies used for cost avoidance & productivity, but want their systems to be as fat-client-like as possible.

Here, they aren't talking about blogs, but down a level to how you architect software. Just search and replace 'big media' with 'Oracle' or 'Microsoft'.

I'll have to go back and read The Diamond Age.

Posted December 5, 2006 12:20 PM by Bill Humphries

Larry Flynt and what he achieved with Hustler reminds me of the end of the Stephen King novel Firestarter: Without spoiling much, someone who figured out that major "serious" publications would be watched and silenced instead went to the Rolling Stone to spill something.

If we had the money maybe we could take out ads that boiled down to "They are lying to you," but naturally no amount of money would get those ads aired on the very outlets of the liars. For all the popularity gains, I am still not sure that blogs have gone beyond "talking amongst ourselves." I remember a few heartening times when a particularly ugly item finally made it on to "real" newspaper pages after the blogs had been shouting about it for three days or more, but the very fact that we can itemize that list shows that they are exceptions that prove the rule. What options are then left to us?

Posted December 5, 2006 1:51 PM by Zeynep

You know, as annoying as it is, the presumption of superiority doesn't piss me off nearly as viscerally as the rhetorical alliance with The Common Man. The Times decided a bit ago to be more sensitive to religious conservatives and people in the flyovers (I think Brooks was part of that wave), and since then they've been periodically writing articles about snake-handler level know nothings with all sorts of neat ideas about changing the culture who earnestly swear they're representative.

And hey, why check if anyone actually takes these people seriously? They're lumpen. Proles dig that.

At least the Wall Street Journal comes out and says that vulgar herd don't matter.

Posted December 5, 2006 2:02 PM by julia

Zeynep@55: Larry Flynt and what he achieved with Hustler reminds me of the end of the Stephen King novel Firestarter: Without spoiling much, someone who figured out that major "serious" publications would be watched and silenced instead went to the Rolling Stone to spill something.

The movie of Firestarter completely screwed this up by trotting Drew Barrymore straight through the front doors of The New York Times.

Posted December 5, 2006 2:06 PM by Julie L.

Rasselas @ #26: If violence is what the public wants, surely the GOP and Mr. Bush would be more popular than ever?

When we consider the recent elections, let's not forget that the New York Times withheld the story and evidence they had of Bush's massive spying on US citizens until after the 2004 election, because they "didn't want to influence" the vote.

Posted December 5, 2006 2:32 PM by Clifton Royston

I wonder what Edward VII and the abdication crisis would have looked like if there had been blogs following the story?

Would they have:
- leaked news of Mrs Simpson? The British public weren't aware of her until the abdication speech.
- repeated the slanders about Mrs Simpson in Singapore? She was (falsely) rumoured to have been a prostitute.
- dug into Edward & Mrs Simpson's Nazi sympathies?
- found things we don't even know yet?
- made up things more scurrilous yet?

(All of the above, of course.)

Posted December 5, 2006 2:41 PM by abi

Luthe (29) gets a separate comment all to herself:

"The problem with blogging is that it sets up its own elite. Yes, it may be a more egalitarian elite because it is made up of people not "in the know" and therefore more likely to broadcast information that has been withheld from the public, but it is still an elite. To blog implies that one has a computer, and internet connection, and the time to read and engage in online discussion."

Which alternate system did you have in mind?

"There are other considerations, too. The list of political blogs is in the hundreds. How does one tell which blogs are worthy of interest, and which blogs focus on areas you're interested in? Does anyone have enough time to do all that reading?"

Are you proposing that someone pre-sort the political blogs, identifying which ones are worthy of interest? How would you distinguish that from setting up a blogger elite?

I assume people find blogs that are of interest to them the same way they find any other material of interest to them on the web.

"Then there is the question of who knows about political weblogs and cares enough to find them. Someone who uses the web primarily to check e-mail, read the Yahoo! headlines, and search for chicken soup recipes isn't going to be reading Kos."

I'm going to take a leap here and assume that these are by and large the same people who aren't interested in reading about politics in the newspaper, or listening to serious political analysis on the TV or radio. Why are bloggers uniquely in the wrong for not getting their attention?

"Bloggers aren't the media elite that likes to keep its secrets, but that doesn't stop them from being a self-selected group."

"A fractured self-selecting group."

"The success of the New York Times is only partially predicated on its reporting. The rest is on the fact that everyone reads it."

I can tell you one way that size of readership matters. All successful publishing operations are the Siamese twins of their production and distribution systems. In the case of the New York Times, one way you can look at it is that because they have a huge readership that expects to have the paper in their hands first thing each morning, they have to have warehouses, printing plants running high-speed presses, fleets of trucks, and all the other components of their complex delivery system. Alternately, you could say that because they have an expensive news-gathering, printing, and distribution system to maintain, they have to attract a big enough mass audience and enough advertisers to pay for their operation.

It would be easy to say both views are true; but to the best of my knowledge, the rise of mass-circulation newspapers has followed the development of expensive high-speed printing (and to some extent typesetting and imaging) equipment.

"Until there is some form of blog consolidation, --

2. If we consolidate, we stop being weblogs. What are you suggesting we become?

3. Why should we turn ourselves into newspapers? Have you looked at the stats on Boing Boing and Daily Kos? They get more readers. More to the point, have you looked at the recent stats on newspaper readership? Of the top 25 papers, all but three have lost readership over the last six months. Some of the losses: USA Today 1.3, WSJ 1.9, NYT 3.5, LATimes 8.0, WAPO 3.3, Newsday 4.9, Globe 6.7, MN Star-Trib 4.1, Atlanta J-C 3.4, Phil. Inq. 7.5, Detroit Freep 3.6, Oregonian 6.8, OC Register 3.7, Sacramento Bee 5.4.

What those number don't tell you is that the average age of people who subscribe to a major daily paper just keeps going up.

I don't know what's happening with televised news.

-- bloggers will have less power than the MSM."

"We don't have the reach, and we don't have the convenience."

"Once these problems are overcome, --"

" --blogs will rule the world, --"

"-- and politicians will run for cover."

Posted December 5, 2006 2:41 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Trackback: Blog Traffic Volatility.

I don't so much respond to Teresa's mediations on blogger as public intellectual as explore (tangentially) the impact of that blog methodology on blog traffic patterns.

Posted December 5, 2006 2:52 PM by Kathryn Cramer

I know; but I've tried telepathy, and it just doesn't work.

Ah hah! That's why I keep hearing Teresa's voice. That crown in my lower jaw must be made of an alloy sensitive to telepathic waves.

Posted December 5, 2006 2:53 PM by Serge

Part of what's happened to the LA Times is the changes resulting from its long-distance management by the Chicago Tribune. Part of it is that it's been cutting back on coverage for years (accelerated by the Trib folks, but they didn't start it).
Example: There was a multi-alarm fire last Tuesday night, about a mile from where I live, and about a block from the railroad (carpet and flooring warehouse), starting shortly before 5pm. It ended up being an all-night affair, with fifty or so engines on hand, and multiple news copters overhead. The LA Times didn't cover it at any level I could find. It was front page at the Daily News (which is generally not worth the price, being just above bird-cage liner).

If I want local news any more, I can't get it except from the smaller papers. Why should I subscribe (or buy at a stand) a paper that isn't going to tell me what's happening in my area, especially when its big stories are the same stuff I can get on TV or online?

Posted December 5, 2006 2:56 PM by P J Evans

Abi #59: Back then there was The Week put together by Claud Cockburn.

Posted December 5, 2006 2:58 PM by Fragano Ledgister

It does surprise people how good SKY News is in the UK, compared to FOX in the USA.

And the BBC isn't at it's best. They're negotiating with the government over the renewal of the charter and the licence fee, and there was the whole mess of the Kelly Case. That's the BBC account of the incident--you should assume the BBC is picking its words very carefully.

If you want an American example of how government can try to nobble the news media, I'd rather not point at any case. You know your media better than I do.

Posted December 5, 2006 3:08 PM by Dave Bell

Four things:

1. Meyer: ... they were brutal critics of big government.

Um, no, they weren't. They want "big government" to funnel tax money to the upper levels of society, not the middle and lower levels. I recommend The Conservative Nanny State by Dean Baker, which is available free on line.

2. One of these days we’re going to think up a new word for these guys, so that we won’t have to use the “conservative” label on people who think there’s something inherently objectionable, and probably illegal, about speech acts that espouse views they don’t agree with.

Fascist? Truly an overused pejorative, but in its defined sense, "A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism," fascism is happening now through the collaboration of media and government.

3. I sat in the audience at the "Hardball" taping at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government when Matthews interviewed Howard Dean in February 2004. When Dean said big media had too much power and needed to be reined in, I knew that was it for him, and sure enough, not too much later he was out of the race thanks in no little part to the "Dean Scream." It wasn't that his politics are too radical (they aren't) -- I sincerely believe that statement was his undoing.

4. Matt Taibbi. Seymour Hersh. Howard Zinn. I don't even trust the local newscasts any more. It's so easy to see how, when some things are emphasized and others not mentioned, the news takes on a slant that reinforces the status quo.

Posted December 5, 2006 3:19 PM by murgatroyd

Edward VIII. Not VII.

Ever notice how VIII is not a good number for British monarchs? Henry. Edward.

Posted December 5, 2006 3:37 PM by abi

(abi... Did you know that there is a mistake in the URL associated with your name?)

Posted December 5, 2006 3:43 PM by Serge

Theresa (60): I'm going to take a leap here and assume that these are by and large the same people who aren't interested in reading about politics in the newspaper, or listening to serious political analysis on the TV or radio.

While there's some truth to this, I think a fairly significant number of smart, well-educated and politically concerned Americans remain in the dark about the entire blogging phenomenon. There are still many, many people who haven't stuck their toes in these waters.

Anecdotally, I offer my own workplace: A small research institute on one of the most wired university campuses in the United States. When I mention reading something in a blog, I still get blank stares from most of my colleagues, some of whom still don't quite know what a blog is. Many of them see their computers as mere tools for doing their jobs; some still don't own computers or have 'Net access at home. Of those who do, several do so only for the sake of their kids. The same is true for my close friends; a few are as geeky as I am, but many others - bright, engaging, politically active - are not interested in computers or the Internet. I may think that's a mistake, but who am I to tell them how to spend their time?

Me, I think blogs are a potentially powerful and democratizing tool for sharing information and building community. But I think it's a mistake to overestimate how many people are touched by them, and to dismiss those who are not as apathetic know-nothings.

Posted December 5, 2006 3:45 PM by Pat Kight

(Fixed.

You cyberstalking me? Unlike Teresa's, my blog's stale, as are my two bookbinding sites. I spend too much time writing sonnets, not enough blogging.)

Posted December 5, 2006 3:46 PM by abi

Cyberstalking, abi? Nah. Just curious about where that'd take me.

Posted December 5, 2006 3:49 PM by Serge

This page might have been vandalized. There's an excerpt from "Tempting Faith" badly embedded into the end of your original message.

Posted December 5, 2006 3:54 PM by Patrick Connors Sees Something Odd

Rasselas (26), that's grim, but I don't altogether disagree. I have a theory that's slightly tangential to it, which I may write about soon because I've finally found a dab of supporting evidence.

Steve Buchheit (34): "Whoever thought that we would all have to be Kremlinologists within our own country?"

Ken MacLeod. It's called The Execution Channel, and it should be out next summer.

Derek Lowe (38):

"It's interesting that many conservatives feel almost exactly the same way about the media and about the political elite. I know, I know - how can they, when that's who they really are, etc.

But you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone on the right who trusts much that comes from CBS, the New York Times, Reuters, etc., for many of the exact reasons that this post details. These people are similarly estranged from what are seen as "the only opinions worth having by decent people", decent people being defined as (e.g.) reporters at the above outlets, presidents of Ivy universities, commentators at NPR and other upstanding types.

This persists even with Bush in office, Scalia on the Supreme Court, and all the other examples of overwhelming-conservative-control that I'm sure folks here can adduce. Whether this is nuts is a topic for discussion, but it does exist. And it does so to the degree that Teresa's post would (without the specific examples of, say, Glenn Beck) be perfectly acceptable to readers of "The Corner" at National Review Online.

I should know - I'm conservative myself, and I feel like throwing things when an article in the Times, a piece on NPR, or a remark by Hillary Clinton or any of a long list of elected or appointed officials goes the mode of: "We know what's best for you - don't trouble your little head, and if you were as good as we are you'd think the way we do, anyway."

But first: I know very well that this phenomenon isn't limited to the center and left. One of the things I pulled out of the main post at the last minute was an extensive excerpt from David Kuo's book, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. Kuo was the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He's now Beliefnet's Washington Editor. I pulled the excerpt because it was about exploitive and condescending political insiders, not the mass media; but the patterns are much the same.

Kuo talks about how the Compassion Capital Fund got far less capital than was originally announced, and how in many cases announced expenditures simply didn't happen. It gradually became apparent to him that the process of assessing applicant charities was a farce. Most of the money went to organizations that had been politically friendly to the administration.

That was a grave disappointment to Mr. Kuo. Just as upsetting in its way was the attitude of the White House staff:

[E]vangelical leaders were people to be tolerated, not people who were truly welcomed. No group was more eye-rolling about Christians than the political affairs shop. They knew "the nuts" were politically invaluable, but that was the extent of their usefulness. Sadly, the political affairs folks complained most often and most loudly about how boorish many politically involved Christians were. They didn't see much of the love of Jesus in their lives.

Political Affairs was hardly alone. There wasn't a week that went by that I didn't hear someone in middle-to-senior levels making some comment or another about how annoying the Christians were or how tiresome they were, or how "handling" them took so much time.

I started out conservative. I've watched the kind of people I grew up with get screwed over, lied to, and condescended to, over and over again, by the kind of people who clustered around Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. The first time I typed the words, "Just because you're on their side, doesn't mean they're on your side," I was in a discussion with a bunch of conservative Republicans. I also said, "Look, these guys belong to a club. You're not members and you never will be." I won't either.

But back to this perception of yours that the tone you hear from the mainstream media is that the things they tell you are "the only opinions worth having by decent people," and that the oppressor class includes "NPR types" and college professors.

I absolutely believe that that's what you hear. I've heard similar things plenty of times from other conservatives. This has got to be something real.

Here's one thing about it that puzzles me: most "NPR types" and college professors are no closer to the centers of power than you and I are. If I had to characterize their tone when they're talking about public affair, it would be something more like "These are the best solutions we know of to a set of fairly intractable problems," or "It's my opinion that this is right." I don't hear the "We know what's best for you poor fallible ignorant little people" thing. Whether or not the hearer is a decent person isn't there at all.

Is this tone something you hear in my writing? Can you hear it in anyone else here, or in some identifiable public figures? If someone has it, do they have it all the time, or is it situational? Does it have anything to do with regional accent? Do you have a regional accent, and if so, which one?

Work with me. We're on to something here.

Just casting about while I wait to hear back --

I know that when I was a kid trying to make sense of the world, the major newspapers and the news magazines were extraordinarily irritating. I could tell that they were being written in encoded language, but I couldn't break the code. It didn't make me trust them. I'm better at breaking the code now, but I still don't entirely trust people who write like that.

There's also the primal fact that one of the things the mass media are worst at is giving people the impression that they're listening.

When we listen to a message, one of the preliminary questions we ask is whether we belong in the assumed set of persons it's talking about. If we don't come up with a "yes" early on, we give it a lot less credence. We doubt its applicability. But genuinely mass media can't talk about us. All it can talk about is "most people".

If politicians and newscasters were as good as advertising agencies at projecting the sense that you (whoever you are) are part of the natural audience for whatever they're going to say, this would be a different country.

Time to take another break.

Posted December 5, 2006 4:25 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Wow. I'm thoroughly depressed, angry, overwhelmed, pissed off, enraged, and apatheticized.

I'll let everyone know which one wins as
soon as the coup is over.

Posted December 5, 2006 4:49 PM by Greg London

Teresa: But back to this perception of yours that the tone you hear from the mainstream media is that the things they tell you are "the only opinions worth having by decent people," and that the oppressor class includes "NPR types" and college professors.

Teresa, I cannot speak for Derek, and I don't pretend to know why he thinks as he does or hears what he hears, but I've spent some time in a culturally conservative area in the South, and there is a very, very deep suspicion of and hostility toward higher education. Public service announcements run on the radio about how getting an undergraduate degree in college can help you run the family farm. Where I lived, something like 60% of adults had a high-school degree. Anyone who went to college, much less had an advanced degree, was presumed to be an arrogant, faithless alien, most certainly Not One of Us. The scorn leveled at "book learning," and the lengths people there will go to to avoid being accused of it, can't be overstated.

Contributing to this is the idea that "college types" don't really work for a living. I heard this from my own family.

Posted December 5, 2006 4:51 PM by Aconite

Anyone who went to college, much less had an advanced degree, was presumed to be an arrogant, faithless alien, most certainly Not One of Us. The scorn leveled at "book learning," and the lengths people there will go to to avoid being accused of it, can't be overstated. Contributing to this is the idea that "college types" don't really work for a living. I heard this from my own family.

There are attitudes that people have that disempower their own members. There isn't much you can do about that other than point it out to them in a way that they can hear it and get them to change.

But this is different than the attitudes and other memes that people have that disempower some other set of the population, especially if the people propagating the attitudes are not being forthright with the people they are disempowering.

It's one thing to think college folk don't really "work" and decide not to put yourself into college.

It's another thing to have a college degree and tell folks that people with degrees don't work and that they shouldn't bother getting one.

Posted December 5, 2006 5:00 PM by Greg London

"f the vast field of political weblogging has sprung up seemingly out of nowhere during the last few years, it’s because the underperforming professional journalists are leaving us with so much material to work with."
There certainly is a lot to work with, but I think that calling journalists 'underperforming' or 'dysfunctional' misses the mark. They do what they are paid to do.

Posted December 5, 2006 5:01 PM by Dick Durata

Slightly off-topic, but as a relative newcomer to this blog, I hadn't seen the "Common Fraud" post until you linked it here. As I posted there (before realizing belatedly that I was posting on an old thread and hence would likely go unheard), I found the stuff on "tort reform" fascinating and informative, and was wondering if you know of any similarly useful references on "immigration reform"? Most of the websites I've found seem to shout "PROTECT US FROM THE MARAUDING HORDES!", while a relative few acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, the problem is a little more complex, but don't seem to offer any insight into that complexity.

Posted December 5, 2006 5:03 PM by Mark Reed

Mark, I wrote a response in the Common Fraud thread.

Posted December 5, 2006 5:37 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Axiom - when anyone says you can't know the truth for your own good, they are lying. If 'They' are doing something they just can't tell you about, they shouldn't be doing it.

Looks like the Land of the Free has itself a class system, just like Old Europe. Take a lesson from us. We groundlings may talk class war. The ruling class doesn't talk it, it just fights it, tooth and claw, day in, day out, year in, year out.

Apropos of where this takes you, I'll point in the direction of the latest EFF newsletter (if you haven't already been there and aren't already incandescent). I mean, the authorities can't do that over here because of the Data Protection Act (they may do it covertly, of course, with the fine disregard for the law of spooks everywhere) How come you're letting them get away with Security Profiling you?

Posted December 5, 2006 5:42 PM by Martyn Taylor

And a corollary, Martyn:

Anytime the lower classes even so much as talk about changing the system a little for their benefit, the rich call, "Class warfare!"

Posted December 5, 2006 5:50 PM by Nancy C

I don't want to speak for anybody, but regarding Teresa's post @ #73:

1) Saying "trust me I'm a professor at Elitist College" (typical NPR commentator) is the same type of argument as saying "trust me I'm a reporter at Elitist Newspaper." It's an argument from authority.

2) The media may be members of the "elite" club, but they are "B" or "C" members. Much like the Medieval clergy (see my post @ #40) part of the price of being invited to the club is not pissing off the "A" members. (More then a few medieval bishops learned that it was Bad Form to piss off a guy with his very own army.)

3) Blogging has the same decentralizing effect as did Gutenberg's printing press. Considering that the effect of Mass Media over the past century has been to centralize "things," this makes it even harder for the elites to accept blogging. Not that Gutenberg's invention was well-accepted (Thirty Year's War, anybody?)

Posted December 5, 2006 5:58 PM by Chris Gerrib

It's an argument from authority.

And democracy is argument ad populum,
but it's the best we've got.

Posted December 5, 2006 6:12 PM by Greg London

Teresa@#73: I'm fairly certain that there is a substantial regional component to the phenomenon you describe, and that it's tied to vocabulary and presentation more than content, because NPR commentators and their ilk often have the effect-as-described on me, even when I agree with what they're actually saying. And lord knows I didn't come from a Southern family that was easily put off by big words, or that was lacking in respect for education. A Southern family, yes. But the other, no.

Posted December 5, 2006 7:33 PM by Debra Doyle

If you want another right-wing fulmination against the press, try Michael Novak's anti-press screed at the Weekly Standard. This one takes the form of a letter from a jihadist propaganda minister explaining what he's learned from the US prosecution of the GWOT.

Posted December 5, 2006 7:53 PM by Linkmeister

Aconite #75: I saw that when I worked in Kentucky back in the 90s, in a college town.

Posted December 5, 2006 7:53 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote:

But back to this perception of yours that the tone you hear from the mainstream media is that the things they tell you are "the only opinions worth having by decent people," and that the oppressor class includes "NPR types" and college professors.

I absolutely believe that that's what you hear. I've heard similar things plenty of times from other conservatives. This has got to be something real.

Here's one thing about it that puzzles me: most "NPR types" and college professors are no closer to the centers of power than you and I are. If I had to characterize their tone when they're talking about public affair, it would be something more like "These are the best solutions we know of to a set of fairly intractable problems," or "It's my opinion that this is right." I don't hear the "We know what's best for you poor fallible ignorant little people" thing. Whether or not the hearer is a decent person isn't there at all.

I'm a college professor and an 'NPR type', and I certainly have not been saying 'I know what's best for you....' That's because, very simply, I don't. I do know what a lot of people have thought about some fairly basic problems because that's some of what I teach and if people want I can explain it to them, but I've no claim to be god or anything like it. I have come across people who believe that what I do isn't 'real work' and I have students who have difficulty understanding that the capacity to think critically is a valuable skill.

What bothers me about much of the US today is the increasing anti-intellectualism coming from people who do not realise that the US's technological and scientific edge over the rest of the world is a large part of what is keeping them prosperous.

Posted December 5, 2006 8:04 PM by Fragano Ledgister

#84: *lightbulb* My father is a college professor, raised in the South, who refuses to listen to NPR because he feels like they're talking down to him. I'm a college professor, raised in the South-ish parts of Texas by a pair of Southerners, and I don't listen to NPR either. I thought it was because I'd rather read my news than hear it, but now I'm wondering. I'll listen to Morning Edition tomorrow and tell you what I think.

Posted December 5, 2006 8:24 PM by TexAnne

It's not a big surprise that anti-intellectualism is on the rise. Intelligence is vastly overrated as a survival trait: it is more effective by far to be either a jock or born into a rich family (or win the lottery).

Posted December 5, 2006 8:29 PM by Earl Cooley III

My blog is just boring. But Shankar Vedantam's WashPost column "Department of Human Behavior" yesterday talks about psychological entrapment as the reason so many people think we shouldn't leave Iraq.

Posted December 5, 2006 8:52 PM by Marilee

I'm getting more nervous about listening to NPR because they have taken a foolish turn to the right (they weren't left -- never were), and that has included added unreason, non-reason, and just plain nuttiness to the news mix, at the expense of in-depth reporting.

Oh, Nina Totenberg is still good. Teri Gross at FreshAir is fantastic. But they are outlyers these days.

I think a lot of people mistake information for "leaning left." Reporters are more liberal than most Americans because reporters read a lot more, and they know a lot more, on average. Don't confuse accuracy with a liberal bias. They aren't the same thing at all.

Posted December 5, 2006 9:08 PM by Ed Darrell

Teresa, thanks very much for your reply (#73). I don't think that it's exclusively a regional thing, although I am originally from the South. My accent is nothing like it was when I was a teenager, but people here in the Northeast can still tell that I'm not from here.

But at the same time, I have a PhD, and make my living as a scientist. I'm writing this from a room nearly walled in by books of all sorts (and in several languages). So, anti-intellectualism doesn't seem to be the problem, either. I'm uncomfortable with the way your reply lumps "college professors" together. I mentioned the president of Ivy universities, actually, which was a reference to what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard.

I think the feeling I get is more from the unspoken assumptions. As far as I can see, in the NY Times/NPR worldview, Any Decent/Intelligent Person is in favor of certain things. Of course, I think that any decent or intelligent person is indeed in favor of certain things (like the things found in, say, the Bill of Rights), but the bien pensant list is much longer.

For example, and I'm not for a moment proposing to debate these topics here, I am deeply opposed to making ownership of guns illegal, but would very much support having them licensed to the degree that cars are (including a periodic competency check). I am extremely pro-free-trade, and think that agricultural subsidies (for example) are abominable. At the same time, I am in favor of stem cell research, having no religious objections to it since I have no religion. I think the idea of a constitutional amendment to make flag-burning illegal is ridiculous. I think that Terri Schiavo was irreversibly brain dead. And I supported the invasion of Iraq, and regard proposals to negotiate with Syria and Iran over its current situation as dangerously naive.

OK, then. By the standards of the New York Times, I do not seem to exist. If I oppose gun control and am suspicious of Iran, I must oppose stem cell research, right? Yahoos who hold the first two positions always do. This cuts both ways, of course. By the standards of, say, Rush Limbaugh, I probably don't exist, either, but he's an entertainer, not a Newspaper Of Record.

As for specific examples of the irritation I feel with some media outlets, just about any NPR commentary by Daniel Schorr would be a good starting point. Maureen Dowd's columns would be another. Both, to my sensibilities, seem almost unable to believe that anyone without severe cognitive disabilities would find anything to disagree with in their views. I don't hear the "These are the best solutions we know of to a set of fairly intractable problems" tone from people like this.

The right has plenty of this as well. I don't watch Fox News, for example (but I don't watch any cable news channel). I can see how someone on the left would want to take any radio playing Rush Limbaugh and throw it out the window. Hey, I don't watch Fox News, either - but I don't watch any cable news channel, for that matter.

Posted December 5, 2006 9:46 PM by Derek Lowe

#81 - Nancy

The patron saint of the ruling class is Malthus, by whose doctrine if you or I get a crumb more, they get less. Thus ignoring 200 years of economic expansion.

What were y'all saying about anti-intellectualism?

Posted December 5, 2006 9:47 PM by Martyn Taylor

Unfortunately, I'd have to adduce Ed Darrell's comment right before mine as well. "Reporters are more liberal than most Americans because reporters read a lot more, and they know a lot more, on average." There's the problem - I read a lot more than the average, myself, and I like to think that I know a few things. But I have somehow managed not to be politically liberal, at least by Ed D.'s standards, I'm sure. How's it possible?

Posted December 5, 2006 9:49 PM by Derek Lowe

Derek, do you still support the war in Iraq, or do you think it's time to get out?

Posted December 5, 2006 9:56 PM by TexAnne

Derek, by your list of topics, I don't exist either (pretty much straight down the line).

I suspect part of the problem is that authoritarian types are extremely uncomfortable with education, since it tends to result in people who ask uncomfortable questions (like 'why are we in --?') and do other anti-establishment things. It's so much easier, after all, if people just do what they're told and keep quiet the rest of the time.

Posted December 5, 2006 10:16 PM by P J Evans

#94: Derek But I have somehow managed not to be politically liberal, at least by Ed D.'s standards, I'm sure. How's it possible?

Isn't this sort of like the bad joke about the statistician who drowned in a lake whose average depth is 3 feet?

Even if we stipulate that reporters, on average, are more liberal than Americans are, on average, how does it follow that the most conservative reporter is still more liberal than the most liberal non-reporter American? That's the assumption I have to make in order for your question to make any sense. However, I just can't see it.

Are you really saying that George Will is more liberal than most Americans?

Posted December 5, 2006 10:28 PM by JC

JC, I'm referring to Ed Darrell's belief (comment 91) that reporters are indeed more liberal, because they read a lot more and know more. Now, whether reporters are more liberal or not is a point worth arguing (I think that they tend to be, at the national level), as is whether they read and/or know more. I'm going to let those go by, though, as side issues.

It's the assumption that reading more and knowing more just naturally moves your opinions more to the left that struck me.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:00 PM by Derek Lowe

#21: After 2000, 2002 and 2004, you want journalists, or anybody, to have greater faith in the electorate?

You're criticizing the electorate's ability to make an informed decision based on the facts when you lie about the facts they make their decisions on?

Or are you merely saying that if they can't tell when people are lying to them, then they deserve what they get?

It does explain why more educated populations tend to vote for more liberal and egalitarian causes and generally saner policies.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:01 PM by Glenn Hauman

Re: NPR, the show I've seen the biggest rightward shift in is Marketplace which used to be pretty straightforward and actually dared to discuss labor issues - until David Brancaccio left. Now they've got wackos from the American Enterprise Institute and Cato on just about every episode. I really used to enjoy it - now I avoid it.

You can find the old NPR alive and well in shows like Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, where it's humor and therefore safe and unthreatening.

I've never felt like NPR was talking down to me, which is why I still listen. I tried out Air America, but I feel like it's yelling at me, and I don't like being yelled at. And it has ads. For shady investments and patent-hemorrhoid cream.

For me, blogs are a news filter. I only look at newspaper sites for local coverage.

Oh, and Teresa - I sincerely hope that, besides blogging for our collective well being (thank you!) I hope that you blog because you enjoy it.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:07 PM by Larry Brennan

@ # 94

Derek, I've never heard of you and know nothing about you, but it seems obvious to me that you arrive at your political positions not just through being well-read, but also through the cumulative experiences of your entire life.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:16 PM by Karen

I have not relied on the New York Times to get things right since they had a story about how New York City's dialect was dying out. Every expert they quoted said, quite plainly, that the New York Metropolitan Dialect was changing rather than dying. Before that, I had noticed little mistakes in most stories about things I knew something about; but this was a big one. And if they could get something this wrong when they didn't have any real stake in believing something other than the truth...

More recently, I stopped paying much attention to the Times best seller lists when they split children's/YA books off into a separate list. Now, it might have been completely coincidental that this kept Harry Potter novels from displacing more respectable fiction. Or it might not.

The newspaper I trust most is USA Today. Oddly enough, it's not among the most prestigious American newspapers.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:36 PM by Dan Goodman

Martyn Taylor (#80): Looks like the Land of the Free has itself a class system, just like Old Europe.

IIRC, the level of single-generation upward mobility in terms of income percentile is significantly lower in the USA than it is in "hidebound, stratified" Europe these days.

This is according to that crazy Commie rag The Economist...which, since they have a very nice web archive of their articles, make it easy to find the original source: The rich, the poor and the growing gap between them from the June 15, 2006 issue.

Oh, and why do we see so much "math is hard" lauding of innumeracy? Probably so people don't notice things like this:

Average after-tax income per person, Mr Bush often points out, has risen by more than 8% on his watch, once inflation is taken into account. He is right, but his claim is misleading, since the median worker—the one in the middle of the income range—has done less well than the average, whose gains are pulled up by the big increases of those at the top.

Read this Autor/Katz/Kearney paper on the increasing polarization of the US wage structure, or these two papers from IZA-Bonn. ("Our study [...] uncovers evidence that, while middle-class mobility may be quite similar across countries, the United States has more low-income persistence and less upward mobility than the other countries we study.")

Seen any mention of any of this in the US press? I haven't. Well, there was one John Allen Paulos commentary, which as far as I know never went anywhere but the ABC News website.

Posted December 5, 2006 11:49 PM by Christopher Davis

The decision by the press corps to get rid of Hart captures my attention. I wonder if they made the same decision about Howard Dean. I remember a segment on Hardball that ran a few weeks after The Scream. Chris Matthews ran the ta