The feebleness of mainstream American media

Paul Krugman is a terrific economist and a great newspaper columnist. His cool, sane perspective on the Bush regime is one of the few bright sparks in the prevailing darkness. Here’s a report on his gig at Harvard the other day:

“Krugman was a riot on Big Media’s docility.  “If Bush said the earth is flat, of course Fox News would say ‘yes, the earth is flat, and anyone who says different is unpatriotic.’  And mainstream media would have stories with the headline: ‘Shape of Earth: Views Differ.’…and would at most report that some Democrats say that it’s round.”  There’s “something deeply dysfunctional,” he observed, with established media facing “something we’ve not seen before, an epidemic of lying about policy.”  Three years of Times columnizing have been “a story of radicalization” for the liberal (but not too liberal) economist who was hired by Howell Raines in 1999 to explain trade policy, globalization and the Internet bubble.   He has become instead the irrepressible child watching the Bush parade, speaking truth to heedless power.”