A no-longer hidden war

Peggy Noonan, pining for the good old days (the ones when people didn’t leave open microphones lying around):

We have had these old press fights in the past – they were a source of constant tension when I was a child, when Barry Goldwater came forward as a conservative and the press scorned him as a flake, and later when Ronald Reagan came up and the press dismissed him as Bonzo.

And Jerry Ford. You know, the guy who couldn’t hit a golf ball without braining somebody, and who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Oh, and of course Dan Quayle. And Bush I. And Bush II.

But this latest fignt commences on a new and wilder battlefield. The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite;

Ah yes, those specialists in the Always Deniable Attack Indirect, notably the Raised Eyebrow and the Questioning Inflection. But Different Times require Different Measures!

the new combatants are half-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical web site.

Who originate the smears. Which the “legitimate”press then “reports”.without checking. Oh, and don’t forget to mention the New York Times. (Fortunate that we dealt with Dan Rather four years ago.)

This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential for great harm...

A friend IM-ed the day after Palin’s speech, and I told him of an inexplicable sense of foreboding.

Cue scary music.

This campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark.

Didn’t take.long, did it?

Hey Peggy, it’s the same old war, it’s just that this time around, the legacy media is no longer making even an effort to conceal that they’re the propaganda arm of the Democratic party.


Elsewhere:

Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 21:21:02 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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