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Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:00 AM

The decay of serious journalism and Rachel Maddow's new show

The New Republic -- of all places -- laments the loss of "nuance or intellectual rigor" on television as epitomized by MSNBC's troubling decision to give an actual liberal her own show.

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  • Thursday, August 21, 2008 07:45 AM

    Curtis, don't be an idiot.

    The point here is obvious: it literally doesn't matter if Maddow is a walking stereotype, because OTHER NETWORKS EMPLOY BILL O'REILLY AND GLENN BECK, among others.

    In any event, the entire cult of media objectivity is crap anyway, a product of a sterile and oligopolistic moment in media history: postwar broadcast TV. Journalists historically were expected to show respect for facts, but were also expected to operate from a particular ideological and partisan perspective, and to bring unremitting hostility to bear on public officials and figures of opposing ideologies. It was only when news coverage began to be dominated by the oligopoly of the big 3 TV networks that media began to be seen as some sort of quasipublic entity that was supposed to show "fairness". And the decay of journalism as an institution dates from that time and from the adoption of that mindset, and I would argue is the result of that mindset.

    We were vastly better served by our journalists when they were polemicists. The yellow press did better by all of us than the Grey Lady or Columbia's School of Journalism ever did.

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