Reply #11: Don't misunderestimate me ...

[HamdenRice]

I like AAR a lot. I like Randi. It's just that I get depressed to think that an era in journalism is passing -- the era of the pretense of journalism as objective and non partisan. Maybe that was all an illusion anyway and we are better off with a British style media. There, each newspaper is a Labor Party paper or a Tory paper -- full stop. Maybe this is a good thing, because the old "objective" charade created an oppressive and false consensus -- if no newspaper touched a topic or viewpoint than it was crazy, because of course the newspapers are reasonable.

I'm really just lamenting the end of one era and the beginning of another.

I do worry, though, that if media becomes explicitly partisan, we can't win because we can't afford to own as much media as the RW multinational corporate sector. In a way the so-called independence and objectivity of journalism helped level the playing field between a generally very rich right and a working class/middle class left.

As much as I loved F 9/11 can you imagine if the right begins financing and producing point-of-view, editorial "documentaries"?

It will be time for an American "Triumph of the Will."