After those two rather heavy posts, how about something a little lighter as a change of pace?

You wouldn't know it from the images of the rather sober-looking fellow who graces this site's photo section, but I used to be a very enthusiastic skateboarder in my youth (I even contributed a couple of items to Thrasher magazine in its very early pulpy underground days). But my boarding skills were no match to this young fellow's.

One more from Collyvvvvvvornia, as Gov. Schwarzenegger pronounces it. Last June, we looked at the ACLU's efforts to remove the tiny cross from Los Angeles' county seal, an effort that L.A.'s city council was only to happy to oblige.

In contrast, The Wall Street Journal notes that James Hahn, the city's liberal mayor, is using the issue as a bulwark against his opponent in an upcoming mayorial primary--which makes sense: his late father, long time Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn helped design the logo back in 1957:

Charles Johnson spots a San Francisco Chronicle article praising a new book written by a self-described Bay Area Marxist-Leninist. And last month, we linked, in fairly short succession, to an L.A. Times article glorifying Sunset Hall, a Los Angeles retirement home for elderly communists and a worshipful editorial on North Korea.

It's just fascinating watching newspapers let the mask slip these days. It's happened in the past of course: the New York Times' Walter Duranty whitewashed Stalin's show trials and his collectivist farming famines out of his coverage--and won a Pulitzer in the process. And the Grey Lady's obit of Stalin is practically necrophilia with a typewriter.

But for the most part, most big city newspapers have, historically, kept this sort of stuff to a minimum, so as not to risk offending a diverse readership. It's curious that articles like those in the Chronicle and L.A. Times keep popping up recently. I can only think that part of the reason is to taunt and tweak bloggers and Bush voters a little bit--or simply to appeal to newspapers' dwindling core audiences as those who don't buy into the left's take on history go elsewhere. Or maybe it's just to keep spirits up in a newsroom that can be a bit gloomy at times.

But geez, talk about revealing your inner self. I mean, I don't lose a whole lot of sleep when a newspaperman tells me that FDR's New Deal programs were the perfect tonic for the Depression--even if in reality, they merely dragged it on and prolonged it until World War II jump-started the American economy. I don't mind the press praising LBJ's Texas-sized equivalents thirty years later, even if they did little to actually end, as it was called back in the 1960s, "the War on Poverty".

I'm just surprised at how far the press has been willing to let it all hang out there recently--of course, based on how they covered the presidential election last year, I probably shouldn't be.

Update: Speaking of the L.A. Times, Patterico catches them selectively editing Reuters wire copy to, as he says, "remove critical facts supporting the U.S. position on an important international issue"--the shooting by US soldiers in Iraq of a car bearing Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena.

Back in 1998, as part of their 30th anniversary, Reason looked at numerous books on the future written during those past thirty years, to see who got it right, and who--really--got it wrong. (Paging Mr. Ehrlich, Mr. Paul Ehrlich to the white courtesy phone, please).

I think you could make a pretty good case that Alvin Toffler's 1980 book, The Third Wave was one of the books that got it right. There's a reason why Newt frequently sited it during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, and why it still holds up fairly well today. It doesn't hurt that Toffler had already written Future Shock in the late 1960s, which--while still enjoyable--was quickly rendered somewhat dated with its atmosphere of sixties' zeitgeist. Toffler wouldn't make that same mistake again with The Third Wave.

Here are my thoughts on Toffler's book, written for an Electronic House magazine subscribers' newsletter, and reprinted here by permission. (The resource links at the end of the post are also from the original newsletter):

In his latest Newhouse column, James Lileks writes that conservative base of the Republican party will never forgive Sen. John McCain:

Oh, they don't hate him; he has that brash, squinty charm that makes him stand out among the dull lumps of coal heaped in the bin of the Senate. His war record earns respect and gratitude -- so much, in fact, that his detractors feel compelled to wait three or four seconds before rolling out the big, throbbing BUT that invariably precedes discussion of what they really think of McCain nowadays.

He got a pass on campaign reform, aka the George Soros Empowerment Act, since you can't really slam him for something that Dubya inked into law. But siding with the Democrats against reforming Senate rules to allow a vote for the president's judicial nominees? Unforgivable.

For some thoughts on where the GOP as a whole stands, check out Richard Baehr's latest essay over at The American Thinker, found via Betsy Newmark.

In his latest Wall Street Journal "Wonder Land" column, Daniel Henninger combines a look at Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives and a look back at how the Fairness Doctrine and its repeal shaped the last 50 years of politics:

Reuters reports that Internet ad revenues are surpassing dotcom boom levels:

U.S. Internet advertising surged 33 percent in 2004 to a record $9.6 billion, surpassing levels seen during the early Web boom, and will grow at a similar rate in 2005, according to data released on Thursday.

The figures bolster reports from individual advertisers who say they are moving more of their marketing budgets online as consumers devote more time to the Internet and fewer hours to television and other media.

The data also underscores breakaway earnings results for major Internet media companies and search engines like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc., as well as the digital divisions of traditional media companies like the New York Times Co.

"Interactive advertising has clearly become a mainstream medium and one that can no longer be ignored," said Greg Stuart, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

And that trend is not likely to change for the forseeable future: the Internet's demographics have to be far more appealing to media buyers than television, whose viewing demographic is only going to become greyer and greyer.

Glenn Reynolds links to this James Pinkerton article from Tech Central Station on Hollywood and videogames. Pinkerton asks, "Why has Hollywood proven to be so far behind the cutting edge of entertainment?"

Glenn responds:

Movies encourage passive titillation; videogames encourage active involvement, and often present consequences as well.

And maybe that's Hollywood's problem. A culture built around passive titillation isn't likely to view its audience in ways that facilitate active engagement.

Disturbing essay by Caroline B. Glick, the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, on the increasing anti-Semitism of England's elites:

Mainly due to Britain’s relationship with the US, Israelis have a tendency to view it as an ally. But the situation on the ground in Britain must force us to reconsider this friendly view. Today Britain manifests the symptoms of a suicidal society. Its elites have been taken over by far-Left bigots who, while purporting to care for the downtrodden, work to perpetuate a situation where the Arab world is wholly controlled by brutes who call for the destruction not only of Israel, but of Britain itself.

Anti-Semitism, which has become pervasive among Britain’s aristocracy, and the chattering classes in the media, culture and academia, is a sign of Britain’s steep and steady slide into nihilistic self-destruction. Their animus towards Israel and towards Jews who refuse to denounce the Jewish state, has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with them. They are fully aware of the threats posed by the international jihad but rather than fight it they have tried to appease it by at once denying its danger and obsessively embracing Palestinian terrorists and calling for Israel’s destruction. They do this even as the jihadis in their own country make it clear that they are unappeasable.

There is nothing that Israel can do to stem Britain’s decline. All we can do is keep our distance from that self-destructive society which, like a dying lion, can still do us great harm if we let it get close to us.

Update: Welcome readers of Salon's "Dau Report", published by Peter Dau, who was online communications advisor to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

Another Update: Charles Johnson has more.

Found via Michelle Malkin, Scott Sala of Slant Point says that Ward Churchill and MEChA (remember them?) have teamed-up, for maximum academic moonbat silliness:

Hmmm. Hispanics mad that America took their land. Native Americans mad that America took their land. A match made only in modern American academia.

Update: More here.

Andrew Ferguson writes that "in the great struggle between cities and suburbs, raging now for a century or more, the verdict is finally in: Cities lost. The vast majority of people prefer the ``burbs.'' The long-predicted comeback of the traditional city isn't in the cards":

There are lots of obvious reasons for the cities' decline -- the decentralizing effects of telecommunications, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the inconveniences of public transit -- but Kotkin is more appalled by the steps urban planners take in hopes of reversing the decline.

``They think they can revive their cities if they make them `hip and cool,''' he says, referring to the street festivals, cafes, arts fairs, high-end boutiques and other yuppie delights that attract the young and single, the childless and rich.

``But that's not how cities last,'' he says. ``You can't build a long-term civic culture around transient populations.''

What any healthy city requires is a stable base of middle- class families. But the conditions necessary for attracting and keeping families are precisely what city planners ignore.

``They've forgotten the basics,'' Kotkin says. ``Are the schools good? Are the streets clean and safe? It's a lot easier to satisfy the yuppies with no kids than to fix the schools.''

And so city life, once the backbone of civilized social arrangements, devolves into just another ``niche lifestyle.''

Much as I love Manhattan, I'd much rather get my dose of city living in small controlled doses, than live in an environment like that all the time.

Well, probably not. But Mickey Kaus observes an L.A. Times columnist suggesting that Google or Yahoo--or maybe Google and Yahoo--pony up $15 billion to purchase the badly listing west coast representative of the legacy media.

Mickey lists numerous reasons why that would be a very bad investment for an Internet portal. And, of course, it seems unnecessary to make this prophecy come true.

Yesterday, we mentioned the nostalgia for the past emanating from the left and the press. Nowhere is that more apparent (well, other than at a Creedence Clearwater Revisted concert) than the endless references to Vietnam. In an essay on the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Jonah Goldberg observes:

Since the beginning of the second Iraq war, comparisons, insinuations, allusions to Vietnam have been a near-daily occurrence. Literally thousands upon thousands of articles and editorials make the analogy as though it were actually a novel insight. You get the sense that Earth could be invaded by Klingons and some editorialist would hear "echoes of Vietnam" amid their disruptor blasts.

One is tempted to simply chalk this up to the geezerification of liberal baby boomers who can't shake their nostalgia for the glory days of speaking truth to power. But many of today's younger generation have been Vietnamized as well. This isn't as odd as it might sound. World War I seemed like ancient history before the ink on the armistice was dry. World War II, meanwhile, continues to dominate our imaginations, on the right and left, six decades after it ended. As any historian will tell you, public understanding of WWII has become far more literary than literal. So it is with Vietnam.

There's an enduring myth that Vietnam was a singular evil undone by America's idealistic youth, holding hands and singing songs in one voice for peace. This reflects the ego of baby-boomer liberals more than the facts. Not only did large numbers of young people support the war, but in the annals of unpopular wars, it wasn't that special. In 1968, Sol Tax of the University of Chicago cataloged anti-war activity from the Revolutionary War until the beginning of peace negotiations and found that Vietnam ranked as either the fourth or seventh least-popular war in American history.

Regardless, Vietnam is part of our cultural DNA now, and it will probably never be fully erased anymore than the Civil War or WWII will be. Right or wrong, silly or legitimate, that's the reality. And that's fine. If people want to argue about the Tet Offensive forever, so be it. But it is history.

But it's not particularly useful history. Ask military experts about the similarities between Vietnam and Iraq (or Afghanistan), and their eyes roll. Vietnam was a state-to-state war and had vastly more support from its Communist benefactors than Iraqi "insurgents" could ever receive from Syria and Iran. Indeed, in Vietnam, the insurgency phase of the war was largely over by 1965.

The Spanish-American War, for instance, would probably be a far more fruitful point of comparison for critics of the Bush administration, but that would require they read up on it first.

I didn't intend for the past couple of days to feature run-on posts on the dangers of postmodernism. But that's the theme that runs tacitly through my reviews of Fredrick Taylor's Dresden and Orson Welles' F For Fake. Both works are illustrations, in their own way, of just how pliable reality is--and just how eager some people are to accept those who manipulate it, if they're entertaining enough.

Al Sharpton began his career on the national stage with the Tawana Brawley hoax, and built on that fakery to the point where he ran for the presidential nomination in 2003 and early 2004--and was fetted in the last presidential election by both Al Gore and Bill Bradley.

Michael Moore began his career as a filmmaker with a sham documentary on GM and after a sham documentary on a current American president, and as a result, sat next to a former president last year at the Democratic National Convention.

Moore's ability to manipulate the truth was a key theme in 2004, when both he and and the news media were more than willing to invent, out of whole cloth, entire fictions to first destroy the popularity of, then depose a sitting president. Or surpress reality, if that suited their purpose.

If there's a conservative documentarian interested in a making a film of last year, might I suggest he call it "M For Fake"--since the letter "M" can stand for Michael Moore, the Media--and meshuggah. As James Lileks said, "The past was more malleable than you had ever expected". If there wasn't a Blogosphere around to expose such invention, there wouldn't have been millions of smiling people with purple fingers in the Middle East this year--and the promise, hopefully, of more to join them.

In a 2002 article, Paul Mirengoff of Power Line looked at some of the reasons why so much cheating has gone on in politics during the last decade. I can only wonder what other "M For Fake" moments flew under the media's radar during that time.

Update (6/29/05): This post was expanded into an article for The New Partisan; click here to read it.

On September 11th, 2003, we linked to a James Taranto item about the Copperheads, which one reference source described as:

in the American Civil War, a reproachful term for those Northerners sympathetic to the South, mostly Democrats outspoken in their opposition to the Lincoln administration.

So many people turned to the accusations of anti-Semitism, ethnic intimidation, and politics trumping academics at an Ivy League School in a liberal voting district. Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, said as much in his interview with The New York Times a few weeks ago:

Although Mr. Bollinger did not comment last night on what the report is likely to say, he said it was "simply preposterous to characterize Columbia as anti-Semitic or as having a hostile climate for Jewish students and faculty."

I would argue that it is precisely this assumption of liberal, enlightened behavior that blinds the public to anti-Semitism on Columbia's campus--and to wherever radical professors use the cover of the liberal university to their illiberal advantage. Remember that it took an outside organization, the David Project, to bring Columbia's problems to national attention.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was not this same attitude that set Columbia University up one hundred years ago as the headquarters of racial scholarship regarding the Civil War and Reconstruction. That right--the intellectual apologists of Southern Redemption were based right here in New York City. Professor William Archibald Dunning became Columbia's first Lieber professor of history and political philosophy in 1904. His popular theories of the Reconstruction provided the source materials for, among other things, D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," and cemented racist ideologies throughout the country for half a century.

From the school of William Archibald Dunning to the school of Edward Said: Columbia University enters the twenty-first century in the same tradition it entered the twentieth. All this, from the heart of New York City.

When Orson Welles completed F For Fake in 1976, he never intended it to become the last film of his to play in movie theaters during in his lifetime. Welles would live for another nine years, but his final days alternated between lucrative voiceover and character actor work, and a constant search to find financial backers to get his own productions released.

After F For Fake, he never did. I'm tempted to write, "sadly", but to a certain extent, Welles had only himself to blame: generally speaking, a director must be bankable--his films must turn a profit--and Welles' films rarely did. As I wrote in an early Blogcritics piece about Welles' first and best film, Citizen Kane:

Citizen Kane's inability to turn a profit, coupled with Hearst's actions, ultimately blackballed Welles in Hollywood.

Incidentally, Welles was far from blacklisted--a far, far too loaded a word to describe what happened to his career post-Kane. He worked constantly in movies, both in front of and behind the cameras. He just couldn't come to grips with the seemingly obvious fact that movies have to turn a profit, which means they have to connect with a mass audience. Even Kubrick, the most avant-garde of American directors, knew instinctively that he had to build his films around large, popular themes - nuclear hysteria, outer space, horror, Vietnam, and sex. His one film that didn't have a theme that a large audience could immediately tap into, Barry Lyndon, failed to turn a profit in the US. He wouldn't make that mistake again for the three films he had left in him.) Welles couldn't find a plot or protagonist that a mass audience could bond with.

Danger! Violent, potentially mellow-harshening metaphors ahead: Hugh Hewitt buries the Los Angeles Times in a speech to the L. A. Press Club. Meanwhile, fellow southern California resident Burt Prelutsky writes, "If The Times Were A Horse, They’d Shoot It".

Speaking of mellows being harshed, Tim Porter writes on "The Mood of the Newsroom":

The amount of anger and hostility, of distrust and suspicion, of inertia and ennui that pollutes the journalistic environment in these newsrooms at first surprised me. Now, when I first step into another newspaper I only wonder how long it will take to surface.

Initially, before the realization grew within me that the negativism was not sporadic but pervasive, I tempered my perception of it with the desires I heard from so many journalists to do good work, to chase on still after the dreams that drew them into reporting or photography - speaking truth to power, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, and, of course, the byline.

After a time, though, I came to see that many of these journalists, and not just those swimming in my end of the generational pool, used these nostalgic desires as substitutes for the actual passion and energy necessary to achieve their journalistic dreams in today's new world of news media. In other words, their notion of "doing good work" meant doing journalism the way it was done "before," a temporal concept loosely bound in the wrappings of time before cable, before Internet, before loss of authority, a time in which "the paper" was "the news."

Remember George magazine? The celebrities meet politics magazine that made a huge splash, lasted a couple of years, and then quietly died? Jim Geraghty says that Arianna Huffington's new "celebrity collective blogging" venture "has 'Tina Brown's Talk magazine' or 'John F. Kennedy Jr.'s George magazine' written all over it--and he's preparing to "savor the impending schadenfreude":

Let me offer a theory on why blogs took off: Many of the best were written by folks who were either A) professional writers who wanted to write in a non-article or column form (Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan, the Corner gang) B) lawyers/law professors who are used to persuading the public (the Powerline guys, Glenn Reynolds, Volokh, Hugh Hewitt) or C) interesting people who happen to be insightful/funny/great writers (Steven Den Beste, Stephen Green, Amy Welborn).

You notice few of those folks are celebrities in their own right — or at least, they don't already have a format to offer their thoughts/analysis/reporting on a regular basis.

If I want to know what Walter Cronkite thinks, sooner or later some journalism magazine will ask him. Warren Beatty, the millionaire who endorses socialism, can tell me what he thinks in movies or in one of his endless glossy magazine profiles. David Mamet gets whole plays to tell the world what he thinks.

Attention, Arianna: We already know what celebrities think. They're telling us all the time. Large chunks of the mainstream media are devoted to telling us the latest political and philosophical breakthroughs they want to share with the world. I suspect people turn to blogs because they want something different.

This project, in short, adds to an already huge supply, in a market for which the demand is limited... perhaps exhausted.

Chris Kobin (found via Betsy Newmark) and Michelle Malkin look at Jesse Jackson's Tawana Brawley incident last week.

(For a look at the original Tawana Brawley incident, click here.)

National Review is praising Disneyland. For our take on the park, click here.

As we wrote last week, the audience of America's "legacy media" is definitely getting greyer--just check all the ads for Geritol, Depends, Fix-O-Dent, Viagra, Levitra, et al. It's not your father's TV news--it's more like your grandfather's.

Where are the younger viewers going? Right here. Well, not all of them to us of course--but to the Internet as a whole:

Thank you to The New York Times for proving the point I was trying to make at the end of my last post--in spades.

Update: Mudville Gazette also looks at the Times' revisionism.

"Europe is a fortress. But it is a fortress without a roof."-Allied propaganda leaflet dropped en masse on Nazi Germany.

While I was in South Jersey, I stopped in the Moorestown Barnes & Noble, and picked up a copy of Frederick Taylor's 2003 book, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. I read through most of it on the plane today.

All in all, it's a magisterial work. Taylor places the city of Dresden not just into the context of World War II, but within the history of Germany, as well as Europe, going back millennia to trace the city's role in history.

Dresden became famous for its role in two overlapping wars: first, as a target of the allies in the waning days of World War II, as the city was bombed by the British and then the US on February 13th, 1945. Of this, history is certain: the bombing leveled the city and left thousands killed.

As Taylor recounts, almost immediately after the city was bombed, Dresden was about to become a pawn in a different war all together: a propaganda war.

Blogging to resume shortly.

In his "Happy Warrior" backpage column in National Review (subscription required), Mark Steyn writes that multiculturalism has had exactly the opposite impact on culture from its presumed original intentions:

The last episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise are beginning to tick off, one by one, until the series ends for good. I watched the "Mirror, Mirror" homage on Sunday night in the hotel, but I missed the teaser and the opening credits, which sounded like a riot, from everything I read about them in the Blogosphere, including this random sampling:

One more for the road: Orrin Judd interviews Brian Anderson about South Park Conservatives.

(Found, logically enough, via the Brothers Judd.)

Update: Power Line also has an interview with Brian. And just to be a completist, click here for ours.

Another Update: Power Line's interview with Anderson is concluded here.

Ann Coulter shouldn't complain too much. Her Time magazine cover photo problems pale in comparision to Farrah Fawcett. As Jerry Seinfeld might say, so what's the deal with Farrah? She's looking absolutely dreadful on Letterman right now. Her plastic surgery looks seriously botched (compare her circa-1998 face with how she looks today); she looks every bit her age (and then some) and sounds like she's swallowed enough quaaludes to fill the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That's enough snark for now. I'm traveling back to California tomorrow; don't expect much, if any blogging in the interim.

Last week, I went with my first thoughts on the Ann Coulter cover controversy and thought that she and Matt Drudge were trying to crank up the hype machine just a little too much:

Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter's attempt to create some sort of controversy over the choice of lens used by Time's photographer to shoot Ann for the Time cover this week seems awfully silly to me.

* * *

I'm all for pointing out errors and lies and bias coming from the mainstream media, but this seems like trying to hype a pretty minor issue to me.

Drudge later zinged Time by quoting his friend Coulter as saying her cover photo -- in which her legs took up half the page -- was distorted. But Executive Editor Priscilla Painton says Coulter went through the photographer's portfolio in advance: "She has great looks. She has great legs. She has great ankles. All of that was on full display on the cover. Lots of women would kill for that kind of display."

There's no doubt about it: big media's audience is definitely skewing older. Via Power Line, George Will observes:

The combined viewership of the network evening newscasts is 28.8 million, down from 52.1 million in 1980. The median age of viewers is 60. Hence the sponsorship of news programming by Metamucil and Fixodent. Perhaps we are entering what David T.Z. Mindich, formerly of CNN, calls "a post-journalism age."

Writing in The Wilson Quarterly, in a section on "the collapse of big media," he rejects the opinion of a CBS official that "time is on our side in that as you get older, you tend to get more interested in the world around you." Mindich cites research showing that "a particular age cohort's reading habits do not change much with time."

Baby boomers who became adults in the 1970s consume less journalism than their parents did. And although in 1972 nearly half of those 18 to 22 read a newspaper every day, now less than a quarter do. In 1972 nearly three-quarters of those 34 to 37 read a paper daily; now only about a third do. This means, Mindich says, "fewer kids are growing up in households in which newspapers matter."

The young are voracious consumers of media, but not of journalism. Sixty-eight percent of children 8 to 18 have televisions in their rooms; 33 percent have computers. And if they could only have one entertainment medium, a third would choose the computer, a quarter would choose television. They carry their media around with them: 79 percent of 8-to-18-year-olds have portable CD, tape or MP3 players. Fifty-five percent have hand-held video game players. Sony's PlayStation Portable, which plays music, games and movies, sold more than 500,000 units in the first two days after its March debut.

Let's consider the media universe. With news and opinion, a lot depends on where people are gravitating for their information, and here the traditional or mainstream media, overwhelmingly liberal in orientation, are losing sway--with astounding rapidity. Writing in the New Yorker recently, the media critic Ken Auletta pointed out something I hadn't noticed: the commercials on the Big Three network newscasts are frequently hawking drugs like Viagra and Mylanta, and the broadcasts themselves often focus on health issues. There's a reason for that emphasis on infirmity: the average age of a network news watcher is now 60; only about 8 percent of viewership is between 18 and 34. Ten years ago, 60 percent of adult Americans regularly tuned in to one of the network newscasts. Now it's only about one in three. And people have lost trust in the mainstream outlets. A Pew Research poll last year found that just 21 percent of its respondents viewed the New York Times as a trustworthy news source--a figure below that of Fox News, it's worth noting.

Americans are increasingly turning to new media to get informed. About 40 percent of Americans now watch cable news broadcasts. One in five Americans, maybe even more, look to political talk radio for knowledge of the world. Around 12 percent--26 million Americans--are now reading political blogs, a medium that didn't really exist a few years ago (and even more are using the Internet more broadly for information). And in the new media, the Right either dominates (as with talk radio and increasingly cable news, where Fox News is the ratings giant) or has at least as much influence as left-of-center sources (as with the Internet and Blogosphere).

Publishing is no longer a liberal preserve--just look at the bestseller list. New York publishing houses, long resistant to conservative ideas and arguments, are falling over themselves to launch right-of-center imprints and sign up conservative authors. Simon & Schuster has just announced former Bush official and pundit Mary Matalin will head up a new conservative line, joining Penguin Books's Sentinel and Doubleday's Crown Forum, both recently launched right-of-center imprints.

All these changes have taken place in just a few years. The oldest of the new media--political talk radio--dates only from the late eighties, after Ronald Reagan's FCC junked the Fairness Doctrine. Fox News has only been around since 1996. The blogs and Internet publishing are of course newer still. Their full impact has yet to be felt.

The future of the big media that the young have abandoned is not certain. But do you remember when an automobile manufacturer, desperately seeking young customers, plaintively promised that its cars were "not your father's Oldsmobile"? Do you remember Oldsmobiles?

Charles Johnson links to a couple of interesting articles on the new Sean Penn/Nicole Kidman movie. Its producer has been quoted as saying that he "didn't want to encumber the film in politics in any way"--which of course means that it's crawling with politics--Hollywood style.

Will Collier of VodkaPundit looks at Cordex Petroleum Inc., a Canadian company that Saddam Hussein had invested a million dollars into prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Cordex, incidentally, is listed as one of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin's assets.

As Will writes:

This illuminates the motivations behind the Canadian Liberal Party's antipathy towards Operation Iraqi Freedom a bit, doesn't it? Then again, I guess when your ideal for governance and policy is Chirac's France, this kind of thing isn't all that suprising.

This past week, after flying the reasonably friendly skies to the east coast, we linked to Tina Brown's latest column, and compared her thoughts with Rod Dreher's great "The Godless Party" essay from 2003. The Anchoress does a full-frontal fisking of it, and makes a great point, here:

There is a lot going on in [Brown's] column - an admission that for the folks on the left the papal election meant nothing more than yet another political defeat. Just as they had deluded themselves on election day (a day on which Kerry’s own pollster predicted a loss by 3% points) to believe that a man who had never actually led the presidential race, who had offered neither real ideas or real military documentation, was definitely going to win the White House back for them, they had decided to believe that somehow the “winner” of the papal elections would be “some youthful cardinal we hadn’t even heard of yet, some charismatic dark horse whom the joyful crowds, so many of them young, would immediately recognize as their own.”

That column is even more fascinating when looked at in the context of last November. Shortly after the election, there were lots of statements emerging from the left that if they're going to have a chance at competing again on a national level, they've got to start taking religion as seriously as they did prior to the Class of '72.

They've had numerous opportunities to do so in the past six months, and little seems to have changed.

Mark Steyn says goodbye, as only he can, to Jumpin' Jim Jeffords with a flashback to 2001:

‘Jim’s a rock star now!’ raved one local politician of the decaff-latte persuasion as Senator Jeffords (R. -- wait a minute, D. -- no, for the moment, allegedly I-Vt.) brushed past and a cheering throng swept us into the packed lobby of the Radisson Hotel (ah, the charms of small-town Vermont country inns). Jim, who normally looks as if someone’s twisting a pineapple up his bottom, seemed eerily relaxed, enjoying his new-found eminence as the world’s most famous obscure senator.

But I don’t think he’s a rock star. He’s more Peter Tork from the Monkees, if you can imagine Peter flouncing off in a huff and joining the Partridge Family. Just over a week ago, Jim Jeffords was an amiable goof, whose three-decade ‘Republican’ voting record read like a guy who’s holding the road map upside down – he voted against Reagan’s tax cut but for Hillary’s health plan, against Clarence Thomas but for partial-birth abortion. This is what we in the media call ‘a force for moderation’. But it took a most immoderate act to secure Jim his place in history: in quitting his party, he’s ended the GOP’s hold on America’s longest continuously held Senate seat – Republican for 140 years. Better yet, he’s brought a dash of Westminster horse-trading, a touch of Italian coalition politics to Washington: for the first time in US history, control of the Senate is passing from one party to another without anything so tiresome as an election.

Sorry for the lack of posts these past couple of days. On Friday, Nina and I drove from Washington, DC to south Jersey, where we’re staying at a hotel while visiting my parents.

The night before, we attended the Media Research Center’s Dishonors Awards. I was about to type an extensive recap, but it’s late, I’m fried, and the highlights are all online at the MRC site. So just click on over.

But before I call it a night, it’s probably worth mentioning one element of the show. If the evening had a flaw, it was the lack of mention of the Blogosphere. The evening could have been called "The Dan Rather Show" due to how many 'awards' Captain Dan won--not the least of which was the Quote of the Year. (Guess what it's related to.) But Dan wouldn't have achieved the notoriety he did last year or resigned from the CBS Evening News, if it wasn't for the work of "Buckhead" and the rest of the Freepers, and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. John O'Neill, who accepted the MRC's "Conservatives of the Year" award on behalf of the Swift Boat Vets, mentioned the bloggers and thanked them for helping to advance the Swift Vets' story--and that 15 seconds was pretty much the extent of their coverage.

I'm not sure why there was scant mention of the World of Weblogs--I know the MRC is pretty Internet-savvy. And the Power Line boys were Time magazine's first "Blog of the Year" last year--directly because of their role in advancing Dan's phenomenal knowledge of Microsoft Word. I know libertarian radio talk show host Neal Boortz, who was one of the presenters, has his own Weblog (he blogged about the event before and afterwards). Maybe the MRC was afraid the whole 'Net thing would need too much of a set-up for the somewhat older tilt of the audience. (Although after the awards were handed out and dessert was being served, Nina and I spoke for a few minutes with a 70-something widow who knew all about Hugh Hewitt and InstaPundit, and I'll bet there were plenty more in the audience like her.)

But that's a pretty minor complaint--the rest of the evening was a blast.

More soon, if time permits.

We've linked a few times to some of Tina Brown's classic columns. I still get a kick out of her "more metrosexual approach to foreign relations" line, her reference to 1930s neoconservatives(!), a good 30 or 40 years before there actually were neoconservatives, as well as her "Punk Meets The Godmother" run-in with a waiter who dared question her cocktail party's politics. (Apologies to Pete Townshend for paraphrasing his song title.)

Over at The Corner, Tim Graham highlights her latest report from Fun City:

You have to love reading Tina Brown, since her columns for the WashPost seem to confirm what every conservative suspects about the secular elitism of the Manhattan media crowd. See how she puts it today: "For those of us who came to Manhattan precisely because you're guaranteed never to meet anyone who has read the ‘Left Behind’ series, America's much-celebrated spiritual revival can have its trying moments."

True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the man who was at the time the city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. "This is not a religious city," he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. To walk to the subway every morning, he had to pass in front of or close to two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. Yet this man did not see those places because he does not know anyone who attends them. It’s not that this editor despises religion; it’s that he’s too parochial (pardon the pun) to see what’s right in front of him. There’s a lot of truth in that old line attributed to the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who supposedly remarked, in all sincerity, "I don’t understand how Nixon won; I don’t know a soul who voted for him."

I know Power Line used that headline yesterday (welcome to their readers, incidentally!), but it makes a great point.

I'm stuck in the American Airlines Admirals' Club in San Jose, which has CNN on the bar's TV set, and I can't help but laugh at how many times the CNN correspondents manage to work the word "conservative" into their coverage of Pope Benedict. The British women who report for CNNi really manage to put a nice evil sneer on the word with their accents.

To them, it's a pejorative. But I'm wondering how many people in America's red states hear the word and think, "Hey, the Pope's conservative...what's the problem?"

Of course, religious coverage from a network who's founder once referred to his employees coming back from Ash Wednesday as "a bunch of Jesus Freaks" as he wondered what "the dirt" on their foreheads already seems a bit suspect.

Hugh Hewitt has some similiar thoughts on the same sort of coverage the new Pope is receiving from newspapers.

On the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Mark Steyn flashes back to his original Spectator column on the subject.

Purely coincidentally, Steyn was in Oklahoma at the time, and weaves together coverage of a flop play opening waaay off-Broadway (JFK: The Musical!) with the bombing of Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Through the sheer force of his writing chops, he makes the two disparate stories work remarkably well together.

Update: Speaking of nifty writing chops, James Lileks is in rare form, as he blends thoughts on a new Pope, the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma bombing...and Scooby Doo Go-Gurt. This line is especially nice:

To those who want profound change, consider an outsider’s perspective: the Catholic Church is the National Review of religion. You may live long enough to see it become the Weekly Standard. In your dreams it might become the New Republic. But it’s never going to be the Nation. And if ever it does, it will have roughly the same subscriber base.

Earlier today, we praised Sam Donaldson for having the courage to admit that nightly network TV news was in big trouble if it remained in its current form.

Those daring bloggers in pajamas jodhpurs, Power Line, have reprinted an industry article written by one of the seemingly few newspapermen who understand that big media is in the midst of a technology-driven sea change. He's Phil Boas, deputy editorial page editor at The Arizona Republic:

Here’s what newspaper editors and writers should know about this new Internet phenomenon. Bloggers don’t have much respect for you. You are the "legacy media," the MSM. You’re the Roman Catholic Church to their Martin Luther and his new high-speed cable modem. To Hugh Hewitt (hughhewitt.com), the blogosphere’s leading cheerleader and one of its most polished practitioners, you are Stalingrad in 1944. Your institutions are hollowed out and your walls are scorched.

But of course, Stalingrad held, didn’t it. And that gets me to the second definition of bloggers. They are your light in the tunnel. The newspaper industry has known for a long time that eventually wood pulp would give way to microprocessors. That long-awaited paradigm shift now seems imminent. We may very soon be predominately an electronic medium and that has many print executives on edge.

Newspapers have enjoyed some of the biggest profit margins of any industry for decades and it is unclear if those can hold in a Web-based environment. Moreover, when you no longer need the millions of dollars in capital, the multi-million dollar press, the network of delivery people fanning out across the land, to start a newspaper, the door opens to competition.

If great gobs of capital will no longer separate you from that competition, what will? Information. Or rather, the quality of your information.

We are headed to the Web in a big way and our readers, especially our most engaged readers – the bloggers - are going with us. They are giving us a taste now of what our new environment will be like. They will challenge and cajole us to confront our biases and our mistakes. And if we don’t confront them, they’ll clean our clocks.

They’ll be our competitors and our colleagues and they’ll force us to dig deeper into issues, think harder about them. They’ll show us how to coalesce expertise on a breaking story and drill deeper for the more complete truth. They’re already teaching us today how to own up to our mistakes. You don’t stonewall, as Dan Rather did. You fess up immediately and with full transparency. There’s a lot of garbage on the blogosphere, but there is a high tier where the product is superior and is drawing mass readership. On those blogs, correcting error is part of the culture.

There's a Nick Coleman spotting at Jay Rosen's PressThink Blog. Here's the letter that Rosen received from Coleman:

Gosh. Do you THINK the press is being de-certified? Which side are you on? I thought that was your game plan. You ripped me last fall without even speaking to me because I had the poor judgment (or maybe the balls) to confront right wing wingnut bloggers who have my newspaper (and most others) in the crosshairs of a constant all-out partisan attack. And they are winning, prof. The Star-Tribune now has hired a by-god certifiable right wing activist and power megaphone. Funny, I haven't seen you make any mention of that yet. Nor do I remember you defending me in December when I criticized the dudes at Powerline, who I called extremists while most of the academic press fakers of the world were bending over to kiss their jodhpurs. By the way, in case you haven't paid attention, many other journalists have since come to the same conclusion. I could cite chapte and verse, but why bother.

Incidentally--what is it with blogging critics and clothes references, anyhow?

(Via Coleman's Bete Noir, Power Line.)

I'll be attending the Media Research Center's Annual Dishonors Awards on Thursday in DC. After the truly bizarre and blatantly slanted election year coverage by the media in 2004, I figured if I was going to attend one of these events, this would be the year to go.

If anybody else is going to be there and would like to meet for a drink before or afterwards, drop me an email.

Bill O'Reilly meets South Park Conservatives.

Terrance and Phillip could not be reached for comment.

(Via PoliPundit.)

Just got back from some errands; Hugh Hewitt sounded pretty excited on his radio show about the ascension of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, but noted that "Andrew Sullivan is probably going to stroke out". Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds has a round-up of links (including to Andrew).

Update: Heh.