The Power Line Forum has taken off like a rocket. We don't pretend to control it, we're just trying to keep up with it. There are more excellent posts than we can read, let alone try to reproduce. The single most popular thread on the Forum so far is Your People, Sir, Is a Great Beast, which explores the role of the liberal/mainstream/legacy/drive-by media. This thread currently has 186 posts and 6,669 views. I was struck by this comment by Insufficiently Sensitive, posted earlier this evening:

"The people” are not collectively a great beast, but there’s something to be said for their ignorance - of news unfavorable to the Democrat/leftie point of view. The MSM is almost wholly populated from the top down with actual 68ers or their pupils, who learned after Tet that they could bring down a government simply by filtering the reporting of current events to exclude any showing success of Administration policies - or by reporting US victories, which Tet was militarily, as defeats. It worked then and it works now.

After year 2000, this has been happening in spades, particularly when the Democratic members of Congress saw that the Iraq war they all voted for could be used as a partisan weapon against the Administration by loudly and repeatedly declaring it ‘a mistake’, or ‘mismanaged’, or ‘poorly planned’, or ‘a quagmire’, when it wasn’t over within their childish attention span. MSM was eager to trumpet these negative views, and to supply these adjectives throughout news articles, and to add uncounted editorials wisely saying the same, and even to treacherously expose secret efforts to gather intelligence on terrorists. The reporters cozy in their Green Zone, or in their Washington offices, somehow couldn’t be bothered to notice any successes; that’s not what their editors were paying for.

Never did they address the blatant use of their ‘services’ by the terrorists themselves, nor apparently did they care whether they served, knowingly or not, as cheerleaders for clandestine mass murder. No, they just admired the brilliant use of asymmetrical warfare by said mass murderers, against innocent Iraqis (no moral outrage from MSM, not at all, unless to blame Bush for ‘allowing’ the murders) and against their own country’s military.

It’s not “the people” that’s the great beast, it’s the MSM.

Indeed.

Posted by John at 10:45 PM  |    |