WaPo Bites

I read WaPO so you don’t have to.

Markus Prior, who is on the faculty of Princeton and should be pretty smart, frets that a proliferation of choices has led to polarization into camps of news junkies and people who avoid the news in favor of entertainment. The bottom line for Professor Prior:

“Greater media choice is both gratifying and a powerful political asset for those people who read op-eds and then move on to NPR, Instapundit and Wolf Blitzer. It is more treacherous for entertainment fans. Happy as they are with a remote control in one hand and a computer mouse in the other, they never consciously weigh the pleasure of constant entertainment against the cost of leaving politics to news junkies and politicians. The danger is not that they are seduced by the views of Ann Coulter or Arianna Huffington but that they don't know who such people are. And not that they cast more ideologically extreme votes but that they no longer vote at all.”

Is he having a laugh? If I read the op-eds and then move on to NPR, Instapundit and Wolf Blitzer, I will not be any better informed than if I had spent the day viewing a Gilligan’s Island marathon. In fact, some media, especially cable news, makes people demonstrably stupider for watching it.

People don’t watch the news because they know that it is just so much crap. They don’t vote because they know that the elections don’t matter. I am far more worried about the news junkies, poor deluded bastards, who vote based on a steady diet of misinformation. Professor Prior is a tool.

Evil neo-con apologist William Kristol predicts that the Bush presidency will be considered a success. If he wins the war in Iraq and if a GOP candidate is elected president in 2008, that is. You can be sure that whatever happens in the next 18 months, William Kristol will consider it a success. My favorite line:

“Many Americans will recoil from the prospect of being governed by an unchecked triumvirate of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. So the chances of a Republican winning the presidency in 2008 aren't bad.”

If Americans didn’t recoil in horror from the unchecked triumvirate of Cheney, DeLay and whoever the hell the GOP Senate majority leader was, then there is no trio that will frighten them.

Meanwhile, a front page “news story” does not cite a single source that is not either the US or Iraqi government. I doubt that any journalism was involved in taking that story down.

This “news story” at least includes a phone interview with the Taliban spokesman and another individual who is not a government official. Frankly, I am surprised that the editors allowed the last quote in:

"’The Red Mosque was a created problem,’ said Hafiz Riaz Durrani, information secretary for the Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islami party. ‘America pressured Musharraf to take action, and he pressured the armed forces to take action against the Islamists.’"

In sum. WaPO sucks. If it weren’t for the mega Sudoku, I wouldn’t bother.