You Knew It All Along

Glenn Reynolds reproduces an email from a “reader at a major newsroom:”

Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.

Sadly, it’s true: it is indeed working. We live in a political system that has not yet been adequately described, but one might call it a “mediated democracy.” Mediated by a self-appointed, generally ignorant but highly opinionated “elite” that is not elite by any conventional measure–income, intelligence, education, social position–but that successfully dictates the terms of political discourse even though it no longer controls (exclusively, anyway) the means of production of the news. Someday, social scientists may be able to explain this. For now, we appear to be stuck with it.

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