From the diaries... From Spot-On.
What does it say about the "reality-based community" that a fundamental tenet of its world-view is profoundly unreal? The belief that the mainstream media is set against the American left has emerged since roughly 1998 as a cornerstone of the embattled paranoia that animates the masses from Beacon Hill to Berkeley who cannot grasp why they are out of power. This much ought to be obvious: in a democratic system, one is out of power because one is unpopular -- and one is out of power for a long time because one is profoundly unpopular. But like the preening egomaniac for whom admission of a fundamental flaw will collapse the entire psyche, the American left clutches at any proffered external cause for its misfortune: The war is manipulated for electoral purposes. The Supreme Court is nakedly partisan. The voting machines are rigged. The American media is against us.
It's a stupefying conceit for media professionals, who know their milieu -- and for conservatives, who spent the prior generation asserting that the media was against them. That conceit was certainly fueled by conservatives' own share of paranoia and persecution complexes, but it was still eminently more defensible than the left's descent into the same fear now. Conservatives then pointed to avowed leftists anchoring network newscasts, Communist-friendly reporting verging on genocide apologetics, and a journalism profession shot through, post-Watergate, with a generation of eager anti-establishmentarians. Leftists now point to....Ben Domenech.
Read on.
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