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Tuesday, January 1, 2008 - 7:28pmSanction this postReply
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Wow. This just affirms that today's liberal is a wholly unprincipled creature.


Ed


Post 1

Tuesday, January 1, 2008 - 8:06pmSanction this postReply
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Er.... this is some kind of surprise to you? :)

Actually, there are sincere ones. They are the most dangerous.

Post 2

Tuesday, January 1, 2008 - 8:28pmSanction this postReply
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Right!

By "sincere ones," I take it that you mean the G. Soros type of human-imitating demon which can occasionally be found walking and talking among civilized men. [?]

;-)


Ed


Post 3

Wednesday, January 2, 2008 - 2:10pmSanction this postReply
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That's more than you can say for Time, which, as CQ mentions, just dropped Kristol and Krauthammer, the last surviving conservatives in their lineup.

I have a theory about what's happend to the old media in the past few years.  Superficially you might expect that after Jayson Blair, the Rather memos, the backfired sliming of Schwarzenegger and all the rest, and the consequent loss of audience and reputation, they'd try to fix their problems.  Instead, they get worse.  The LA Times, which I used to read almost every day, has come to resemble an American Spectator parody.  Methinks this is a business strategy.  They've realized that, since broadcast deregulation and the arrival of the internet, they are not longer the de facto national church they were back in the days of Luce and Cronkite.  In response to this, they're retrenching.  Their audience is mostly middle-aged and elderly leftists, so that's what they play to.

As I am not the first to observe, neocons have taken the place that communists used to occupy in some people's imaginations 50 years ago: a shadowy conspiracy, bent on world domination by devious means, inflitrating of our institutions, insinuating themselves into the corridors of power, interlocking their directorates and so on and on, as conspirators will do.  The quotes in the CQ column bear this out.


Post 4

Wednesday, January 2, 2008 - 2:53pmSanction this postReply
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Interesting thesis. However, Time's audience is so large I'm not sure it holds up. Unless you want to claim that the overwhelming majority of those who read popular commentary are aging leftists -- which might just be true these days!

Kidding aside, what is now middle of the road is so socialistic that it would have caused a furor 90 years ago (and did, to whit: the Income Tax) that the proposition is reasonable.
(Edited by Jeff Perren on 1/02, 2:56pm)


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Thursday, January 3, 2008 - 4:36pmSanction this postReply
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I wouldn't claim that the majority of people who read commentary are aging leftists, but that the majority who follow what 20 years ago constituted the "mainstream media" - the 5 or 6 biggest and most prestigious newspapers, Time, Newsweek and the 3 old networks' news shows - and and who take them seriously are.

Post 6

Thursday, January 3, 2008 - 5:43pmSanction this postReply
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You might be right. It would be interesting to see a good study on the subject. If true, it's very depressing. It's hard to say how much influence they still wield, though, with so many popular blogs from well recognized names, etc.

It's a tough subject to get reliable data on which to base an objective conclusion.

Of course, there's one sense in which you're almost guaranteed to be right. The outlets you name are so biased, and so obviously so, that only an aging leftist could take them seriously. ;)


(Edited by Jeff Perren on 1/03, 5:45pm)


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