A lot of people go into journalism because they want to "change the world." So long as they believe that admitting that they are propagandists, not journalists, would make them less effective at propagandizing, they are not likely to do it.

Agreed, Van Helsing. Yesterday Leonard Pitts at the Miami Herald wrote about the recent suicide of a Miami city commissioner who may have been driven to take his own life by a series of stories in the paper (exposing his rather spectacular corruption). Pitts’ article was thoughtful, but I was struck by one paragraph:

It is not the news media’s job to spare feelings. Rather, it is media’s job to put the corrupt, the inept, the mendacious, the venal, the hypocritical and the plain stupid “on blast,” as the kids say, i.e., to publicize their sins and misdeeds broadly. To speak truth to power and truth about power. To call spades spades.

That might or might not be a noble calling, but it’s advocacy. It’s not reporting the facts and letting others slay the dragons. By and large, boomers make terrible journalists because boomers always have to be the star of the story, and you can’t be the star if you’re writing the story.

One other question: do kids in Miami, or anywhere else, really say “on blast”?

I'm to the point where I'm ambivalent on the media bias thing, because it really is now objectively helping conservatives.

The liberal cocoon of NYT/CNN allows Democrat politicians to mature without anything approaching a full vetting. The end result is that realy bad candidates and ideas don't get shot down until close to the finish line, rather than out of the gate. Does anyone think a conservative John Kerry could have secured his party's nomination? It wasn't until the campaign, and late in the campaign at that, that his negatives began to pile up to the point where they could not be ignored. The same was true for Gore, and I predict it will be true for Hillary! as well.

Overall, it is bad for the country not to have a reasonable debate on partisan issues. However, a shrill echo chamber removed from the mainstream hurts the left more than it does the right.

Ayes,

Great point about Kerry. I remember my brother chuckling to me over the phone after Kerry won his party's nomination. His quote was, "The Republicans are gonna crack that guy open like an egg."

He could see it coming, but the Democrats, sheltered from the truth by a biased media, thought they'd found a world beater. Shit, they even threw Dean, the guy they REALLY liked, overboard in order to run someone "more electable."

Kerry WAS "more electable" than Dean.

Dean would have resulted in a McGovernesque blow out.

Truly electable dems had they managed to make it through the primary gauntlet (ex. Bob Graham) get slaughtered early though because of the early influence of the far left states in the primary process and the insane propensity for dems to primary vote for "who they like" (no matter how wierd a spacecase they may be) rather than who might be able to beat the likely opponent.

Graham would have swung FL in the dems favor, and picked up all the traditionally dems states by default.

Basically, dems are suicidal I guess...

George McGovern, coincidentally, was an anti-war war hero.

The bad news is that nothing has changed, but the good news is that nothing has changed. Gradually, the public has begun to see how totally full of shit the MSM is. The emperor can't parade around without any clothes forever before people begin to take notice, and every time they are caught ignoring stories or lying someone else becomes aware of how full of shit they are. It will be years in the making, but a seismic shift is occuring and slowy but surely people are changing their attitudes towards the MSM and Liberals in general as they continue to lie, obfuscate, cover up, tell half truths and behave in a rabidly partisan way while pretending to be objective and informative.

If the MSM did the smart thing (which, being Liberals they're incapable of doing) they would co-opt the New Media by allowing just enough conservative news and commentary so as to appear to be objective and blunt criticism of them as biased. But this would mean that things that may hurt Liberal causes may have to be exposed, something they've refused to do so far and show no signs of doing anytime soon. So we are back to square one.

The bad news is that nothing has changed, but the good news is that nothing has changed.

In the spirit of the sixtieth anniversary celebration of the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I propose that we nuke the two DJ cop killers in St. Louis.

I'm just kidding. Don't anyone dare nuke them.

"Kerry WAS 'more electable' than Dean. "

Hmm, is electability comparative? Perhaps it is, between someone who gets elected and someone who doesn't.

Electability has to be comparative when you're talking about candidates within the same party.

Can anyone with a few neurons firing really believe that Dean would have fared better than Kerry?

Air America's new plan to pay back "loan"