Interesting experiment

Hugh Hewitt played his interview with Timothy Rutten of the LATimes. I had a terrible time finding his column on the LATimes website, which is so cranky that I seldom go there. It seems that every time I try, it doesn't recognize my cookies and goes to a page telling me about why registering with their site will enhance my life. As if.

In the interview, Rutten sounded friendly, interested and open minded. In his column he was like about every other newspaper columnist writing about talk radio, the neo-cons, and bloggers. He sounds like he's rubbing his hands in glee over the news that talk radio listenership is dropping. His condescension grows as his piece becomes more dismissive of conservative opinion, even to the point of quoting W. B. Yeats:

While the political talk-show hosts and right-wing bloggers claim to have a quarrel with mainstream media's alleged bias, their real gripe is that the news media's traditional values stand between them and what they'd like to accomplish, which is the total politicization of all reporting and analysis. Combine this with the messianic confidence that new media — mainly talk radio and the Internet — inevitably will undermine and destroy the economic health of mainstream media — especially newspapers — and you've pretty much got what Yeats had in mind when he wrote:

If Folly link with Elegance
No man knows which is which

. . .

Political talk-show hosts see everything through the prism of their partisan politics and insist, as an article of faith, that everyone else is always doing the same. In this sense, their approach to current affairs is less a conservative one and more a creature of that most powerful of American vices: narcissism.

That last line is priceless. Here's the flashy journalist, flaunting his education and superior wisdom, describing someone else as "narcissistic," oblivious to the irony.

We've all got our own prisms, but just because you have a degree in journalism it doesn't mean yours is better, clearer or less distorting than anybody else's. There are lots of smart, educated people out here who can think and write and analyze every bit as incisively as the press can, many of them better and with more logic than anybody in the news media. I don't claim to be one, but I read blogs from some of them. And I'm not going back to newspaper articles that bury the lede until the 10th paragraph. I need news and opinion that get to the point, and I'm wondering if there will be any need in the future for pundits. There will be books, news sites and blogs. I find myself getting bored about three or four paragraphs into most articles, these days, but maybe I have an attention deficit. Maybe we all are going to have attention deficits in the future.

Rutten's piece is written for his fellow writers, not for the readers. Why should they care about the future of talk radio, newspapers or anything else? Who does his article comfort, except himself and others who are worried about talk radio taking over all media, i.e. liberal paranoids?

Update: Here's another second tier columnist chiding Bush for his "stubborness" on Iraq. Who will he write for when newspapers become anachronisms?

Maybe he can go into comedy. A lot of people seem to be getting their news from Leno, Letterman and Stewart. The problem with that route is that comedians are pretty even-handed in their abuse.

Or he could become a blogger, but I think it's an early adopter field. Who has time to monitor three million sites? I guess I don't get the "long tail" stuff.