Jack Shafer makes exactly the point about Richard Posner's ridiculous NYTBR piece that I would have made if I still had wireless Internet access at home and hadn't been forced to go to Kinko's* to get online. (He also makes a bunch of others too.)
When Posner declares that media competition has pushed the established press to the left, he gives only one example: Fox News making CNN more liberal. Has Posner lost his cable connection? The success of Fox News convinced CNN of the opposite. CNN realized that the demographic that has the time and interest to watch a lot of cable news tends to be older and more conservative, as this Pew Research Center report indicates. If anything, the one-worldist CNN of founder Ted Turner has been vectoring right in recent years. Lou Dobbs, for one, now blabs a Buchananesque position on trade and immigration five nights a week. Over at MSNBC, which dumped overt liberal Phil Donahue in 2003, they've given every nonliberal listed in the Yellow Pages a show in hopes of boosting ratings (examples: Michael Savage, Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson, Jesse Ventura, and now, Rita Cosby).
What the fuck kind of CNN has Posner been watching? I guess not this kind.
* On the Kinko's thing, I'd be interested to know how that place stays in business, even post-Fedex buyout, when it continues to offer perhaps the poorest quality of service this side of the Khazakstan Patent Office, which recently ran out of paper, no joke (and also just sounds like it would probably not be all that efficiently run). I don't have the heart to catalogue all of the various transgressions I've witnessed, not just at the W.72nd St. branch, but at others across the eastern seaboard. The other day they told me they didn't have a single pair of scissors in the store. But there's this one woman who works there who 's clearly the only person there who cares even a little bit about doing a good job, and you can just tell how miserable she is all day, and I just always feel so bad for her. A couple weeks ago I saw her there in the evening, in regular clothes so no one would bother her, on one of the computers searching job listings. (I also saw her walking down my street with her boyfriend once, and they looked happy, and he seemed nice, so, you know, she's probably okay on the cosmic scale.)
