From New York magazine comes a piece titled, "About That Crush on Obama: If Barack is out of touch with America, then the media must be too."

As Orrin Judd writes, "Holy Master of the Obvious, Batman!"

When Saturday Night Live is more in touch with reality than you are, it might be time to get out of midtown Manhattan a bit more often. Maybe visit an Outback Steakhouse, and have some red meat in a Red State, if only for anthropological research purposes.

Update: Dean Barnett writes--and this isn't breaking news anymore, of course--that " the old media are dying":

One of the things that is killing them is their dual pretense of objectivity and neutrality. If Dan Rather was fairer or more objective than the Huffington Post, he had me fooled.

So what will rise from the ashes of the old media castles? What we'll likely have is a Wild West of information where news consumers will have to seek out truth on their own. This isn't unprecedented. After the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Tombstone's two newspapers gave starkly different accounts of the affair, one championing the Earps and the other the Clanton/McLaury faction.

Horace Greeley ran for president at the tail end of his career and invented Andrew Jackson's most famous quote at the start of it ("John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"). Newsmen with an agenda are nothing new under the sun. And the market will reward those with a fidelity to the truth and punish those who demonstrate the opposite. Please see the pathetic Mr. Rather currently toiling away on something called HDNet for comforting evidence of that fact.

The prospect of not having a newspaper or news source of record may frighten some people since it would be new territory for the modern era. But far more frightening is a thankfully bygone era when a media powerhouse like Walter Cronkite could call the Vietnam War lost because he didn’t understand what had happened with the Tet Offensive. Worse still, so impeccable was his credibility that the country would believe him.

Better to have a nation of citizens actively engaged in finding the truth than assuming they're getting the truth from what's in fact an unreliable source.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)