Kathleen Parker: Frayed Ends of Sanity

Kathleen Parker is addling again only this time it's not about Sarah Palin. Ms. Parker feels she has isolated the cause of the failing mainstream media, and it is the ignorant masses being stoked by the "drive-by-punditry" of the Rush Limbaughs in the world.




From her Washington Post op-ed,

BOSTON -- The biggest challenge facing America's struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry.

Yes, Dittoheads, you heard it right.

Drive-by pundits, to spin off of Rush Limbaugh's "drive-by media," are non-journalists who have been demonizing the media for the past 20 years or so and who blame the current news crisis on bias.

There is surely room for media criticism, and a few bad actors in recent years have badly frayed public trust. And, yes, some newspapers are more liberal than their readership and do a lousy job of concealing it.

I am sure none of this had to with the likes of Dan Rather and his Killian Documents incident, Barrack Obama appearing on 12 of Newsweek's 52 issues in one year (This does not include 11 skybox appearances, which brings the total to 23 in 2008.), or the 1997 study performed by the American Society of Newspaper Editors which indicated that 61% of reporters were liberal or held liberal views as opposed to 15% who identified with Republican or conservative values, or how Author Jim A. Kuypers, a senior lecturer at the Ivy League college Dartmouth, in 2002 inadvertently found that the media ignores far-left, conservative, and moderate viewpoints in favor of a "narrow brand of liberal bias." Lest we forget the New York Times endorsement of Barack Obama or Kerry?

As with most conservative apologist writers and left leaning "journalists," Parker suffers from indignation at the insinuation of liberal bias within the media. How can it be their fault? In order to remain in her pristine tower, the Princess must find outside conspirators who are causing her noble profession to falter and to become perceived as ignoble. It couldn't be that journalism has become eaten up from within by the cancer of liberal opinion. This has to have been brought on by those damn brainwashed, peasant, Ditto-heads and their Fuhrer, Rush.

This, as we all know, is the hallucination that these modern day Pharisee languish from. Parker and her persuasion are truly commiserable and deserve very little pity for their failures.