Or we can fund a nonprofit media source–a nice big paper like The Guardian?

And so yes, Clinton and Obama should make nice with the press, stat. Have some barbecues.

you guys are all thinking of “yellow journalism”, a phenomenom (or however its spelled) where, to sell papers, jounralists go and find the GREAT WRONGS, like children working in textile companies. these GREAT WRONGS were perpetrated by evil, evil rich men, not the WONDERFUL GOVERNMENT, who never in any way wanted any sort of mass industrialization or larger taxes.

I didn’t realize that the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island was secretly run by rich men and not the state of New York. So who was the secret owner, Carnegie or Rockefeller?

I think this points to a more general problem of democracy: there are influential but dirty jobs out there that are currently dominated by “jocks”, and the only way the “nerds” are going to get some leverage in these areas is by rolling up their sleeves, holding their noses and wading into the pigpen.

Political reporting must be a nearly unbearable job for anyone who actually cares about policy. You have to spend all your time hanging out with politicians and their publicists. You have to socialize with the kinds of pundits and schmoozers who think that politics is a football game, rather than a dealy serious exercise of our self-determination as a people. People who work in politics, and especially in political reporting, are probably the most apolitical people on the planet.

Other jobs have the same problem. Criminal prosecutors tend to be very conservative, and it creates a vicious circle: what thoughtful law school grad wants to work 12 hour days putting 14-year-olds in prison for drug possession charges alongside a bunch of raging lock-em-up colleagues? The military is dominated by the most conservative and reflexively nationalistic sections of the population… and then we wonder why they get their kicks torturing brown people. Ditto for the CIA and FBI, and law enforcement generally.

The only jobs where nerds predominate are those that have actual qualifications of skill (e.g. technical jobs) or those that are so bereft of actual influence that the conservatives and jocks aren’t interested (e.g. academia, the arts). Our culture being dominated as it is by the jocks, they’ve done a good job of structuring our institutions so that even the high-skill technical jobs are insulated from any actual authority. When was the last time we had an engineer or a PhD in a position of political power in the USA? Our numbers are shocking compared to Europe, China, India, or just about anywhere else. And this is true not just in politics, but in industry as well: we’ve created a mythology whereby technical skill is necessarily equated with a lack of interpersonal skills, this mythology being used to ensure that the professional political class never gets infiltrated by eggheads. I’m afraid that liberals in the arts and humanities are rather complicit in the perpetuation of this mythology.

The divide-and-conquer strategy, as you point out, works quite well on self-loathing nerds.

There are three things that can shake my resolve to keep up some semblance of maintaining kosher laws — good ham, good bacon and good baby back ribs. Yeah, right, DAS, like those are all from the same treyf animal… a wonderful, magical animal.

i’m sorry, my sarcasm is drowning me today…

We had it that way for a century and a half. Human nature certainly includes the qualities that make for a lazy press, but human nature also includes things like adherence to an ideal, respect for ethical boundaries, and pride in a job done well, not by cutting corners. A watchdog press isn’t inconsistent with human nature; it’s simply inconsistent with selfishness, cynicism, and laziness.

I suspect that in the long term something will emerge from the internet that at least partially provides the needed independence and commitment to the truth, provided we can keep net neutrality. Blogs are a start, but even they have only a tiny fraction of the audience of the MSM.

Maybe after class tonight I’ll whip up a little spreadsheet. Cuz inquiring minds want to know!

It’s pretty interesting to look at some of those results with a calculator in hand. Sure, we knew that California would go blue and Alaska would go red, but who thought that Colorado and Georgia would switch to blue? Bush carried Georgia by around 500K votes in 2004 and Colorado by about 100K. But looking at the relative turnout of the Republican and Democratic primaries, it looks like the Democrat could win both of those states.

Assuming they don’t fuck it up, of course. Sigh.

The Post is being pretty pathetic about this, hoping that it blows away. I hope it doesn’t. The way the Post op ed page has shifted to make even the Wall Street Journal page look rational (remember, thie Post is the paper that published an editorial praising the greatness of Pinochet after he died) has been a pretty distressing experience - the arrogance of the thinking of the mostly male editorial crew that they could stomp on women like they were back in their little frathouse, though, has to be confronted.