You Have Been Run Over By A Future-Shaped Truck

The headline just HAD to sound like a Thomas Friedman book, or you wouldn't realise that we're about to excorate the squares for not being hip to the latest in meta-media criticism. This via Instapundit, which should twig you to the fact that we're more bored than we suggested this morning, or at least less good at getting our phone calls returned that we had thought.

Mr. Reynolds twigged us to this post by one Jeff Goldstein, by suggesting it was somehow related to the new South Park Republicans movement. The movement seems to be the right's attempt to reclaim straight-talking people with a sense of humour and a vaguely libertarian bent for their cause. We have no idea whether this has much currency outside of conservative circles (the liberal blogs haven' mentioned it), although we must note that this sort of republican, with a rather laissez-faire attitude, is be less suited to government than a frothing fundamentalist loon, who knows that government exists to order people around. Still, we wish them luck.

But we digress, since we wanted to highlight this line from a rather thoughtful post by Mr. Goldstein on the current firestorm of conservative criticism of the media :

"such constant villification of the mainstream media’s motives, even when their reporting of the facts is accurate, runs the risk of turning valid, needed, and justified critiques of liberal bias into cliches in their own right."

We'd suggest that the mainstream media has probably reached that tipping point already, and might have reached it earlier, if only it listened to more talk radio. The victim meme, we think, is about to change hands. If you want any proof, read Daniel Okrent's parting shot at the Times' critics. Okrent has become convinced by the attacks on the Times that it must be doing something right. And ya know, tin-eared and insensitive as the little chap might be, he might have a point. We'd ask the folks at the BBC, who have laboured under attacks from both of the UK's main political parties, for their thoughts, but they're all on strike right now.