While the American economy is roaring away (the Dow is just over 12,000 as I type this), the legacy media is seeing red in certain quarters. AP notes that "NBC Universal makes $750M in cuts by reducing staff, scripted shows, news budget".

And Pajamas' own Cathy Seipp looks at the L.A. Times' "Manhattan Project" (their name), which, paradoxically, is designed to dismantle a bomb of a newspaper. Good luck to that.

Elsewhere, Patterico writes, "You Read the Most Interesting Things Sometimes in the Business Section"--like the New York Times admitting, yet again, its liberal bias.

Update: Related thoughts from Betsy Newmark and George Will, and Jonah Goldberg.

Another Update: Wow that was fast--a reader with a GE email address writes in:

Amongst us GE engineers, we like to point out that what happened to NBC News is what happens to GE divisions that can't (or won't) follow our internal Six Sigma quality programs.

The moral is that if one can't deliver customer value with a quality product, one might lose one's job.

Do media elites generally believe they're doing a quality job? In one of Bernard Goldberg's books (I forget if it was Bias or Arrogance), he mentions that he's heard television producers make widely disparaging references to their audiences in Middle America. Are they equally cynical about the quality of the product they put out to them? Or do they naively think it's great stuff? I honestly don't know.

More: "Katie Couric quickly slips down news ratings slope"--to the point where she now trails a VH-1 music show starring rapper Flavor Fav.

InstaUpdate: Just to tie in with my title above, Glenn Reynolds writes, "No wonder the Big Media are acting as if the economy is in dreadful shape. For them, it is".