That’s a good point. It made me try to remember the last time I read a piece in a major media publication that materially changed my view of an issue. The only ones I can think of were all written by Mark Steyn. Otherwise, I can’t remember any for years.

Take this piece by Steyn, for example. When’s the last time someone at the NYT, Time, Newsweek, or the Washington Post came up with something that so clearly outlined an issue of the day? It ought to be required reading for every politician in the country, all the way down to city councilmen.

When you’ve gotten used to the incisive analysis of Wretchard or Den Beste, the pap put out by professional journalists as analysis pieces seems pointless by comparison. Even the best of the non-MSM analysts will sometimes be wrong, but at least they are thinking, instead of regurgitating someone else’s talking points or recycling leftist dogma.

I.e., give us their opinion. I find the opinions of journalists far less interesting and informed than the opinions, say, of a soldier in the field. And sometimes the latter also provide facts, something the MSM is not all that good at.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s senior correspondent at the Pentagon, said the traditional skills of sifting through information and presenting it in context were especially vital now because there were so many other sources of information.

“With the Internet, with blogs, with text messages, with soldiers writing their own accounts from the front lines, so many people are trying to shape things into their own reality,” he said. “I don’t worry so much anymore about finding out every little detail five minutes before someone else. It’s more important that we take that information and tell you what it means.”

Superficially, that sounds laudable. But it completely ignores the core weakness of the MSM. They don’t know how to do anything except put words in a row.

How can anyone “tell you what it means” concerning a government tax proposal, when they don’t know squat about economics? How can they evaluate the way a war is going and place an event in context, when they don’t anything about military history, weaponry, or tactics?

MSM practitioners are among the most ignorant people on the face of the planet when it comes to anything that really shapes our world. They don’t understand science, technology, economics, history, or business. Many live in a cultural cocoon such as New York or Boston, which means they also don’t understand middle America, much less the Middle East.

This guy has it exactly backwards. The MSM doesn’t have a prayer of telling us what it all means. The best they can hope for is reporting on the facts they find, and hoping someone out there in the blogosphere with appropriate expertise can tell the rest of us what it means.

Coming from the NYT, an outlet that I have come to despise over the past four years, I thought this was an extremely fair piece of reporting.

This paragraph made me wonder:

But the power of blogs is exponential; blog posts can be linked and replicated instantly across the Web, creating a snowball effect that often breaks through to the mainstream media. Moreover, blogs have a longer shelf life than most traditional news media articles. A newspaper reporter’s original article is likely to disappear from the free Web site after a few days and become inaccessible unless purchased from the newspaper’s archives, while the blogger’s version of events remains available forever.

…whether the NYT’s (among others) policy of having a paid, “premium” section would ultimately be abandoned because the economics of keeping what your writers had “really said” inaccessible (except to paying customers) turns out to be unfavorable.

Gee, think of the delight of being able to read Krugman and Dowd for free again! (Or not!)

Jamie Irons