Is it just me?

Or is Mark Steyn only appreciated in the blogosphere?

The sense of smugness and knowing it all is so thick in the MSM, that conservatives almost have to be iconoclastic to get people to listen and think. But the original liberal/conservative nomenclature doesn't really apply anymore, at least in the media, where the established wisdom is that socialism is the way to prosperity, despite the evidence of history, and true believers are having trouble coping with reality. The media elite are about as isolated and narcissistic in their celebrity as you can get, yet they think they are still on the frontlines of culture. I just watched 5 minutes of somebody named David Mindlich on C-Span2 speaking about his book, Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News. When it became clear that the NYTimes was considered the paragon of news media, I pretty much had my answer. Part of it is that the MSM see their role as "holding the government accountable," while denying their own accountability and the existence of alternate interpretations of events. People under 40 seem to have figured out that the "news" is peddling propaganda. Inevitably, the conundrum of Bush supporters came up. How astonishing that the voters won't do as they're told?

It's assumed, naturally, that Rush Limbaugh misleads his listeners and has drawn away many voters from the truth, when all he has really done is demonstrate the existence of a huge conservative market that has been ignored by the cocooning of the MSM.

Jon Stewart's name came up. I didn't hear his statement on Cross-fire mentioned. He, of course, is fascinating to old media savants who lust after his audience demographic, because he is reliably liberally slanted and has a stand-up comic sarcastic edge, which skewers Democrats more than the dinosaurs on the evening news. He is seen as hip and edgy, which mostly comes from his use of irony, cynicicism and profanity and sex jokes. The blogosphere has emerged this year as an extension of the talk radio phenomenon, people bypassing the commentariat of the MSM to conduct interesting unfiltered discussions of the news.