32 Comments

1. thibaud:

no newspaper or media outlet should ever have the reputation, and therefore the power, the Times had. It’s not good for the free flow of ideas or the search for truth

The Times is the closest thing America has to an official establishment press. The NYT’s editors not only framed the news agenda every day for every other news organization in the nation; they also, by virtue of the monopoly structure of local newspaper biz, served as the national gatekeeper for politics-related information. The real, implied slogan was “All the news that We the Nation’s Conscience deem fit to print… presented as we See Fit.”

Another way to look at it: the Times had, in effect, something like Microsoft’s domination, using syndication agreements and an exhaustive reseller network to push their own monopolized information product. Like MS Windows, the Times’ product was full of bugs and in many ways inferior to competing products which the Times used its market power to eliminate or push out of public view.

No matter: the Times Knows Best. And a “single standard” opinion-setter for the nation’s elite, like a single standard operating systems, also had certain benefits. But even that argument’s losing its validity. Linux in OS, and the blogosphere re news and opinion: open source, as messy as it is, becomes more and more stable and reliable, and customers are beginning to realize this.

Today the NYT’s basically a lifestyle guide for upscale urban liberals. The National Conscience pose was always absurd, but there’s no more monopoly power to enforce it.

May 9, 2005 - 8:36 am 2. Ron:

Reply 10 – Posted by: amereagle, 5/9/2005 5:06:52 AM

1) Take the opinion out the reporting.

2) Eliminate the OpEd page. With the blogosphere it is completely useless to have deadtree buggywhip media dedicated to someone else’s opinion, especially when nine out of ten are same think ol’school loser lefties like Dowd, Herbert, Pinch and Krugman.

3) Wake up and smell the liberal bias.

This was posted in Lucianne this morning. Couldn’t say it better so won’t try.

May 9, 2005 - 8:37 am 3. thibaud:

Note though that as the curtain’s stripped away from the little men at the NYTimes, their readers have begun to turn increasingly to the BBC Online for world news. Same craving, different fix: the need for a “respectable” authority to guide thought, frame issues, present the world on a silver platter, and the bogus pose as the civilised world’s “conscience.” Heaven help us.

May 9, 2005 - 8:56 am 4. RBMN:

My advice for the New York Times:

Unless you’re in the business of publishing psychiatric case studies reference material, you should never publish anything by Paul Krugman. It bares no resemblance to reality, and it scares children.

May 9, 2005 - 9:14 am 5. Kyda Sylvester:

My advice to the NYT:

Forget about “truth” and report verified facts. We readers will grapple with “truth”.

Don’t permit your various agenda to bleed into news reports.

Clean sweep your op-ed pages. Most of your current “talent” is a disgrace.

Don’t patronize your readers. We’re a lot smarter and better informed than you apparently believe.

Lose the NOW/NARAL/DNC/GLAAD/NAACP/UN mindset. In fact, don’t allow any mindset to hold sway over news reporting.

Get over yourselves. Your influence diminishes daily.

May 9, 2005 - 9:47 am 6. Fausta:

If and until the Times starts by reporting facts, I’ll consider their “steps to build credibility” mere self-serving lip-service.

Case in point, Aleksander Boyd challenged the NYT’s assertion that “poverty in Venezuela has eased due to the vast increase in oil revenues”, and wrote to the Editor — only to receive a reply of “I raised your concern with a senior editor who did not believe a correction was merited. Thanks for writing.”

A minimal amount of research on the part of the Times would have shown that Venezuela’s own government’s Instituto Nacional de Estadisticas figures provide clear evidence that the number of people living below poverty level, unemployment, and inflation have substantially increased, while income per capita, number of industries, and foreign investment have decreased in that country.

Not only was the original NYT article wrong, the reply to the letter to the Editor was one of complacency with their “ignorance and indifference”.

May 9, 2005 - 10:31 am 7. ahem:

I’d just like them to be more dispassionate and professional. I suspect, though, that their idea of ‘addressing’ Middle America will be to add a new column on Firearms, feature more Southern recipes and strike out every word over two syllables…

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.

May 9, 2005 - 11:09 am 8. truepeers:

By Jiminy, Thibaud, if you’re right about the migration to the Beeb, it’s time to go a little easier on the Times. “Auntie” as indpendent-minded Brits call her is of course the model for Orwell’s big bro, and she just gets more sinister with global reach. Did you notice how Blair just spent his whole campaign apologizing for a war that should be defensible, if not in every detail? You’d think the English weren’t English any more.

But how do you know this migration to Auntie is underway? The alternative, of course, is not a big bro, but simply a friend. That’s what the blogosphere is becoming, a network of friends, I hope.

May 9, 2005 - 11:17 am 9. Cynic:

Thibaud,

“Note though that as the curtain’s stripped away from the little men at the NYTimes, their readers have begun to turn increasingly to the BBC Online for world news.”

And that is just too bad. The pity is that those looking for news don’t know where to turn for objective presentation of the facts.

“The Times is the closest thing America has to an official establishment press. The NYT’s editors not only framed the news agenda every day for every other news organization in the nation…”

Replacing Times with BBC and America with Britain one gets the equivalent across the pond.

The scavengers (Guardian, Independent) fighting for scraps becoming evermore radical and outlandish in their presentation of the “facts”.

Your analogy to open source software is to the point and one hopes that the bloggers will be as successful as the open source crowd.

How many humans were relegated to purgatory by the thumbs down of the “Grey Lady” and her ilk.

May 9, 2005 - 11:18 am 10. thibaud:

Ironically, it’s the Times’ main quality differentiator, its foreign reporting, that’s the first rampart to have fallen in the web era.

MSM hournos will no doubt argue that the Times’ foreign reporting has declined as bureaus and budgets shrink. Another interpretation is that, like most foreign reporting by most foreign correspondents from this or any country, it never was very good to begin with.

Readers with access to hard data and local news sources can serve themselves far better than the Times’ lazy, hapless parachute reporters, many of whom aren’t even fluent in the host country’s language, let alone possessed of a broad and deep range of local sources.

May 9, 2005 - 11:20 am 11. thibaud:

It’s a bleak landscape: the Times can’t do foreign reporting well, they’ve moved away from covering the city inside and out, and as for national reporting, Nagourney’s election campaign coverage was a joke, and in the capital the Bushies have frozen out most of the MSM press corps. These folks never cared much for covering the flyover states. What’s left?

Answer: opinion, culture news and lifestyle trends, some business reporting. The Times today is merely the New Yorker lite. Superlite.

May 9, 2005 - 11:25 am 12. thibaud:

truepeers,

I don’t have hard data, mainly a hunch based on 1) what I hear from family and friends, 2) an apparently increasing % of NPR programming sourced from the Beeb, and 3) the extremely high % of comments in the Beeb Online’s “Have Your Say” sections that come from American readers.

If my Bush-hating 76 year-old mother is now proclaiming her satisfaction that she can access the Beeb, then there’s definitely a movement afoot. Remember, people who hate Bush are desperate for their daily hit, and if the Times isn’t rough enough on Bush, they’ll go Beeb-ward.

I’d venture to guess that the Times’ main competitor now is the Beeb. Perhaps one day these two embarrassments will merge, like Sears and Kmart.

May 9, 2005 - 11:35 am 13. thibaud:

Case in point on the foreign reporting: where was the Times during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine? What happened to their Afghanistan bureau? Why no coverage of the disaster that is today’s South Africa?

In Pinch Sulzberger’s pomo Times, you’ll find more coverage of the Manhattan gay theatre scene than of international events outside of Europe and middle east.

If the market’s fragmenting, then go with it, baby. Cater to your core readership. Mo’ MoDowd, mo’ Krugman, mo’ Frank Rich, mo’ from the metrosexual beat.

May 9, 2005 - 11:44 am 14. Rick Ballard:

I don’t see any Best of Show ribbons in the Times’ future, even if Keller picks exactly the right shade of lipstick for his Poland China. Changing cosmetics doesn’t address the underlying problem. This porker is ready for the knacker’s yard.

May 9, 2005 - 11:56 am 15. truepeers:

Thibaud,

My mother reports from London that she has just voted Labour, though she understand why people are against the war. I sent her (she’s Jewish) some Melanie Phillips links on Judeophobia in the Labour party, which she called trash, though she seemed to acknowledge, after the argument, i had some point. So I’m thinking even the Times would be an improvement. That, I suppose, is why mergers happen. What will we call it?

May 9, 2005 - 11:59 am 16. chuck:

thibaud,

Ironically, it’s the Times’ main quality differentiator, its foreign reporting, that’s the first rampart to have fallen in the web era.

It fell long ago. I first noticed it during the Kosovo conflict when I was forced to go to the English papers to get any news: London Times, Telegraph, and Guardian. I was truly astounded that the NYT had essentially *no* coverage. That was the end of my idealization of the Times.

May 9, 2005 - 12:02 pm 17. JenLArt:

Guys, if America’s Lefties are turning to the BBC, then they’re not paying attention.

As the NYSlimes went through their scandals with outright fabricators like Jason Blair (not to mention Walter Duranty’s coverup of the Stalinist famine that killed thousands in the ’30s), so the BBC went through its own scandal with Andrew Gilligan and the “sexed-up” WMD story.

It was the subject of an entire government investigation resulting in the Butler report and the story’s “deep throat” committed suicide when his role was exposed, I think because he saw that he’d been ill-used by Gilligan.

And many people were “sacked” over it, including the head of the BBC, Greg Dyke.

Some of the public have incredibly short memories as they will stay loyal to the NYSlimes or the Beeb or CBS News even when they’ve been proven to lie more than once.

The Beeb, followed by the rest of the British MSM, was able to sell the “Blair lied. People died.” meme to a great deal of the British, even though it was clear to anyone who’d really looked into it carefully that Tony hadn’t lied anymore than President Bush.

Bush got soundly re-elected (perhaps due to the Swifties help), but the Leftist MSM in Britain made sure that Tony got a very bloody nose last Friday and the BBC led the pack.

May 9, 2005 - 12:17 pm 18. WichitaBoy:

What this and the previous thread have in common is the existence of an elite group whose members, with oligopoly-provided virtual sinecures in hand, and thus no real necessity to worry about where the next dollar is coming from, desire for their lives to have greater meaning. It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. With the material needs amply met they’re looking to fulfill their spiritual needs.

The job of the MSM is to report the news; the job of Hollywood is to entertain. Those are the things they get paid for, but those aren’t the things that make their motors run. In both cases they want more, they want power, they want to dictate to the rest of us how the world should be. They want to feel that they are important, that their lives have a greater meaning. In both cases they believe, albeit for different reasons, that the world owes them this power, i.e., that they deserve to be in the catbird’s seat. Naturally they resent any manifestation of power which circumvents them and comes from a source or region external to their purview. That’s a big source of the Bush hatred right there. Naturally the federal system itself is antithetical to their aims and wishes, as well as the entirety of the business world outside of those two small niches.

What the MSM is primarily lacking is a good feedback mechanism. That absence abets their desire to be in control, but offers nothing whatsoever to the readers except the opportunity to be a passive “consumer”, a gigantic maw sitting somewhere in Topeka. What joy. The dearth of feedback is undoubtedly detrimental to the news product itself, qua news, but that is no longer the particular concern of the people running things.

The Internet now offers the opportunity for a much more democratic approach, one which is unprecedented in human history. The blogs have the potential for a superb feedback mechanism, but many blogs such as Instapundit or Lileks are no better than the MSM in this regard. As a result, I find myself reading those particular blogs less and less. Moreover, the blogs as a whole lack any real means of organizing news filtering, the primary task of the MSM. The truth is that organs such as the NYT do fulfill an essential function which we as individuals cannot possibly replicate, nor should we want to: to wit, they filter and aggregate the news for us so that we can find information, not just facts. Contrary to popular opinion on here, no one is truly looking for mere facts. The only real reason we want to check the facts is the ubiquitous human propensity toward mendacity, or at least toward not getting things straight. We can’t trust our sources of information. What we all really need and want is useful information, the more compact and the more useful the better. For example, if a perfect oracle should appear before me with the ability to tell me, honestly and accurately, what is really going on in Iraq, Is it working yes or no?, why would I want to check anything else? Life is short and I can’t spend all my time on it.

What the blogs severely lack at the moment is the next stage of evolution, the progress from single-celled to multi-celled organisms. It will now be necessary for individuals to give up some of their sovereignty as it were and to take on assignments doled out by others, for bloggers to coordinate as a group and to leave their egos at the door. This is possible for vast conglomerations of people in the media and in Hollywood because cold green cash can allow one to let go of a lot of ego. There are other motivators, but without some such there is never going to be within the blogosphere the depth and power still offered by the MSM. A disparate menagerie of egoists braying their own little song is a good substitute for Krugman et al., but not for the NYT as a whole.

May 9, 2005 - 12:25 pm 19. David Thomson:

Would the New York Times benefit financially by improving its product? Is it possible that this newspaperís hard core readership demands headlines and new stories more appropriate for an openly partisan publication like the Nation? Might it be that New York and many of the other blue states will get even bluer while the red states get redder?

May 9, 2005 - 1:48 pm 20. Tom O'Bedlam:

Completely OT but it should be mentioned somewhere: Roger’s alma mater (and mine), Dartmouth, has apparently abolished its speech code.

http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/2005/05/here_comes_the.html

As undergraduates said back in the neanderthal days: Wah hoo wah!

THP

Class of 1972

May 9, 2005 - 2:45 pm 21. thibaud:

Is it possible that this newspaper?s hard core readership demands headlines and new stories more appropriate for an openly partisan publication like the Nation?

Of course. Look at the “most e-mailed articles” and you’ll get a flavor of that 10% of the Times’ content that probably drives 70%+ of the customer loyalty. Bill Keller said not long ago that their editorial decision was not to appeal to a broad audience but to cater more intensely to their core following. Keller’s words http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_03/b3916007_mz001.htm :

What most papers do when they want to extend their reach is they go out and interview all the people who don’t subscribe and say, “What would you like?” and then they try to dumb down or spice up their paper to pander to that audience. That’s what produced the kind of McNuggetization of a lot of local and regional papers in America. The Times’ approach was exactly backward. What they did is focus on the most loyal subscribers and identify their characteristics. And then they went out and tried to find more people who are like those people

Keller spins this as taking the high road, avoiding “dumbing down” of the content. But he’s really describing the abandonment of the “paper of record” in favor of a narrowly partisan journal.

May 9, 2005 - 3:11 pm 22. WichitaBoy:

Keller spins this as taking the high road, avoiding “dumbing down” of the content. But he’s really describing the abandonment of the “paper of record” in favor of a narrowly partisan journal.

Right. While continuing to live off the social capital of having once been the paper of record. It’s always the same strategy for decadent institutions, like the British Commonwealth, or like a Hollywood star living off her fading looks and box-office revenues. It’s good for a while.

May 9, 2005 - 3:41 pm 23. thibaud:

Who are the Times’ “most loyal customers” and what are their “core characteristics”?

I’d love to see their market research. OTOH, it’s not too hard to guess, judging from those “most emailed articles.” These are graying urban liberals who think Maureen Dowd the soul of wit, view Paul Krugman as an objective and brave Teller of Truth to Power, and whose core concerns (outside of politics) are either health- or market-related. They have a ravenous appetite for the prices of stocks and of real estate, prices of elite college educations and Broadway show tickets and designer trunk sales.

Paper of record? Nope. Not even that pretense remains. Boy Pinch’s NYTimes is a cross between New York magazine, Money, and The Nation.

May 9, 2005 - 4:00 pm 24. David Thomson:

ìBill Keller said not long ago that their editorial decision was not to appeal to a broad audience but to cater more intensely to their core following.î

Wow, where have I been? I missed that candid admission by Bill Keller. The New York Timeís core base is leftist—and often very well to do. These are people who purchase small Manhattan apartments for two million dollars and think nothing of it. They want to live in their own dream world where all difficulties can be blamed on the Bush administration. We may be witnessing a subtle demographic shift where individuals place a greater importance on the political inclinations of their neighbors. If my theory is correct, then New York City is going to get a lot bluer.

May 9, 2005 - 4:07 pm 25. chuck:

Keller spins this as taking the high road, avoiding “dumbing down” of the content. But he’s really describing the abandonment of the “paper of record” in favor of a narrowly partisan journal.

I’m pretty sure this predates Keller. I’ve felt for some time that the NYT would like to fill the same niche here that the Guardian fills in England. Currently they have the requisite number of nutcase opinion writers but lack the balance, such as it is, of the Guardian. I think their news coverage is worse. But I suppose they will continue to appeal to the “smart” people who can see no reason to question the contents and who feel they are subscribing to *the* high-brow newspaper.

I still think the Times has one of the best science sections, I generally skip the columnists, and the news has to be read with suspicion.

May 9, 2005 - 4:31 pm 26. Joe Schmoe:

David Thomson-

An LA Times commercial on local TV here seems to validate your thesis.

It consists of middle-aged people in black turtlenecks and euro-chic glasses sipping coffee out of expensive-looking earthenware cups while reading the LAT. The only exception was a really good-looking and well built middle aged black guy who was reclining by the pool without a shirt.

When I saw the commercial, I thought it was crazy. Doesn’t eveeryone who fits this profile ALREADY subscribe to the LAT? I don’t know a single wealthy greying leftist who isn’t a subscriber. Not a single one. And the “idealized” LAT subscriber the commercial portrayed isn’t one that will resonate outside of Brentwood. People in middle- and working-class suburbs like West Covina and Ontario who don’t currenlty subscribe to the LAT don’t aspire to be latte-sipping metrosexuals. Many hunger for sophistication and but the wimpy elitists in the ads seem strange and repulsive, not regular folks living an ideal life that you, too, can have if you subscribe to the LAT.

The MSM is so puzzling. Sure, newspapers are going to see a decline in their circulation now that the Internet is here. Sure, ABC, CBS, and NBC are going to lose some viewers to Fox.

But the MSM still has a stable of very intelligent and interesting writers. They still have the resources to cover actual news in a way that bloggers cannot easily duplicate.

And for a while, they even had a reputation for excellence. I used to love reading the online version of the WaPo. For years it was my favorite paper. You can’t really get it if you don’t live in DC, the delivery service that carries it elsewhere gets it to you a day late and is so expensive that it really isn’t worthwhile. But when the Internet came — it was great! I could read the WaPo every day! The Internet actually INCREASED the WaPo’s readership by one in my case.

But like many here, I don’t read it any more. The columnists are still talented. The paper still has the resources to gather facts — bloggers can’t have lunch with some assistant undersecretary of whatever like WaPo reporters can.

But it’s like they are trying to drive readers away. As the years have gone by the WaPo has gotten more and more ideologically extreme. There is nothing but 24/7 Bush bashing today. This is infurating becuase the WaPo could give its readers the truth if it wanted to. It is just miles from the Pentagon! It could report that the war is an incredible success if it wanted to, and could give readers an accurate historical and strategic perspective — but it doesn’t. The WaPo knows that the Bush White House is not filled with bible-thumping extremists — but it won’t admit this. Etc., etc.

The WaPo is the most moderate of all the MSM papers. Yet it is digging its own grave. They all are. There is a moderate readership out there which will read them. But they are spurning these readers in pursuit of a dying market of greying hippies.

Why?

May 9, 2005 - 4:51 pm 27. Syl:

I think half the Times problem would be solved if they replaced their copy editors. Those headlines really stink.

May 9, 2005 - 4:57 pm 28. David Thomson:

ìBut they are spurning these readers in pursuit of a dying market of greying hippies.

Why?î

What does it matter to them? The top honchos at these large media outlets are relatively close to retirement age. They have a few bucks in the bank. Most of them are eligible to collect their pensions within the next few years. In the meantime, they keep their most valued customers happy and continue getting invited to the important parties.

May 9, 2005 - 5:18 pm 29. Terrye:

I honestly can not remember the last time I bought and read a NYT.

Makes me yawn just thinking about it.

For one thing I don’t have the time for another I lack the desire.

I doubt I am all that exceptional.

May 9, 2005 - 5:59 pm 30. Kevin P:

Roger:

For years the elite media has been claiming that the charges of political bias and innaccurate agenda reporting were false. The argued that, while admitting occasional mistakes, they were practicing the highest form of journalism and that any charges that they were not were the ramblings of neandrathals and right wing idealogues.

Does the current mea culpa mean that they were lying all this time or does it mean that in the face of declining revenue they have decided to abandon those high journalistic standards to prostitute themselves for cash?

May 9, 2005 - 8:37 pm 31. isabel:

(I’m posting this comment under a false name because my neighbor is a senior reporter who works for a big metro paper and teaches journalism at a major university, and I don’t wish to embarrass anybody. The following is what I recall from a recent conversation we had that took place over the peonies between our properties:)

Newsman: I’m a Republican, you know, but Bush and the Republicans are trampling our civil rights and ruining this country.

Me: Is that so? In what ways?

Newsman: The Patriot Act violates citizen privacy and hasn’t even been used to arrest a single person. Also, airlines are sharing passenger info with the government which they should never do. We could solve the air terrorism problem simply by banning all carry-on luggage and hardening cockpits, but the profit-driven airlines won’t do this. Flying in Europe is perfectly safe because governments there partially own the airlines and give them a lot of money for things like security measures.

Me: Completely safe on European airliners? What about other sectors of our economy and infrastructure vulnerable to terrorism- should they be nationalized or underwritten by the feds?

Newsman: Sure. Free enterprise doesn’t work so well. Take health care, for instance. Canada, France, and the rest of Europe do so much better than we do with their government programs that take care of everybody.

Me: Even though elective surgeries can be wait-listed for long periods, overall care is low mediocre, and the systems are becoming too costly to maintain? Why do you think Canada and Europe won’t afford decent militaries and instead rely upon the do-nothing soft power of the UN and on our hard power? Would you want to be elderly in France this summer?

Newsman: In Canada there were only four homicides by gun last year.

Me: Have you been following the mounting scandals in the Canadian government?

Newsman: What scandals? (Gives quizzical look.) At least Canada didn’t participate in an illegal war that the UN didn’t sanction.

Me: But the UN is rife with corruption and conflicts of interest over the Iraq question. Just consider UNSCAM, its track record wrt to coddling tyrants, and Chirac’s billions in oil concessions were Saddam to have stayed in power.

Newsman: UNSCAM? (Blank look.) What about how we’ve cut the French out of post-war reconstruction in Iraq? That’s not fair.

Me: (Now I give quizzical look.) Not only did the French not pay in blood and treasury to liberate the Iraqis, they obstructed our efforts. Do you really think Iraqis and most Americans want the French there?

Newsman: But Bush lied about WMD.

Me: Did he? So it was all about Halliburton and oil, then?

Newsman: Yes, read the WaPo series on Halliburton from last year. The war was only to enrich Cheney’s company. The US should have directly contracted services and materiel to hundreds of smaller firms, instead.

Me: But we were mobilizing for war and did not have the time and resources to directly bid out each and every need.

Newsman: We should have done it, anyway. Capitalism is out of hand, and it’s spoiling our kids who expect a grand lifestyle.

Me: Aren’t we indulgent parents more to blame on that last score?

Newsman: Greed and selfishness are the fault of society and our corporate culture. People aren’t even reading newspapers. Circulation rates are in serious decline.

Me: Might circulation decline have something to do with the partisan and shallow coverage traditional media tends to offer and also its own credibility issues?

Newsman: I’m not sure what you mean–

Me: Well, Dan Rather, Eason Jordan and Jayson Blair for starters. And then there’s the war and election reporting.

Newsman: Yes, well, Dan was a bit slow to admit some mistakes and TV anchors are all ridiculous. How about that Bill O’Reilly and Fox News which is anything BUT ‘fair and balanced’?

Me: Agreed about Bill, but do you really think Fox is biased and the other networks aren’t?

Newsman: Isn’t that obvious? Newspaper reporting is the best source of news, however. Do you know about the blogosphere? It’s a complete joke, a bunch of people spouting off about things they know nothing about. Unfortunately, blogs are where more and more people think they are getting the news without ever referencing published newspaper articles and editorials. It’s scary. People aren’t reading enough real journalism and proper news from the professionals; too few people read the NYT, these days. That’s why they vote in people like Bush and Cheney who are destroying this nation.

Me: (to myself) If he’s a “Republican”, I’m a grey spider about the size of a gumdrop. Then again, our paper’s editorial board is so far left he might actually think he’s a Repub…

May 9, 2005 - 8:53 pm 32. Syl:

Thanks for that, ‘isabel’. Between that and the panels I watched on BookTV from the LA Times Book Festival, it’s really sinking in that there is much more than simple bias permeating journalism in the MSM. Bias in a bubble is much more innocent than the ideological driven propaganda we’re getting from our big newspapers.

Between Chris show-more-dead-bodies-and-blood Hedges, and Michael Kinsley who fell all over himself with pride that he was actually sitting there next to, wow, Tom Hayden, I’ve had my fill and will no longer cut the MSM any slack.

A commenter at Tim Blair’s said he lived his first 28 years without ever hearing the conservative side because the MSM disseminated only its pov. I’ll take that further. I lived 59 years before I even knew another pov existed!

Hopefully their stranglehold has loosened. I say what Ledeen implores in another context: Faster, please.

May 9, 2005 - 9:39 pm

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