Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 1:18 PM by Gene

I don't think you should have LINKED to THIS, BLOGGERS OF THE MILLENNIUM:

Right-leaning news operations, and even bloggers themselves, may soon taste the same deeply skeptical scrutiny and scorn they’ve long heaped on the mainstream media. And when they are judged by the same criteria with which they judge others, they will certainly come up short....

Developing hypersensitivity to hidden ideology can easily become a distorting ideology of its own, especially when inconvenient facts, such as journalism’s culture of rejecting overt political agendas, are brushed aside. "It is the tragic story of a ‘mental short circuit,’" Vaclav Havel wrote in a marvelous 1985 essay on a different topic. "Why bother with the never ending, genuinely hopeless search for truth when a truth can be had so readily, all at once, in the form of an ideology or doctrine? Suddenly it is all so simple. Think of all the difficult questions which are answered in advance!"

When you already "know" that the media are objectively anti-Bush, it’s not such a stretch to assert, as U.S. News & World Report columnist Michael Barone did in May, that "today’s press works to put the worst possible face on the war." Or to join Andrew Sullivan in nicknaming the BBC the "Baghdad Broadcasting Company."

The main problem with these characterizations is that they are wrong. The ideology of bias detection begets the shortcut of hyperbole, which then demands escalation when the conditions being described worsen. Many of the same people who roasted Dan Rather lapped up Judith Miller’s discredited New York Times reporting about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. People believe what they want to hear. What are bloggers and other media watchdogs willing to believe about the target of their wrath?

Press bias deserves the scorn it gets; the press has over a century's record of thumping self-righteousness. (I don't know what our intrepid blogger Mr. Welch means by "journalism’s culture of rejecting overt political agendas"; obviously he's never heard of Billy Hearst of Hank Luce or HHHWWWWALTER CRRRONKITE.) But as I've said before, SUPERDUPERMEGAGIGABLOGGERS are now as MMMMMMMSSSSSSSMMMMMMM as DANNO, and because of that they're starting to think THEY CAN DO AS THEY PLEASE TOO.