ginandtacos.com

As a general rule, I am not supposed to laugh at things students say unless he or she is trying to be funny. Even when a student says something ridiculous – "How often did kings come up for re-election in the British system?" – it is unacceptable for the nominal authority figure in the classroom to bring him or her shame and humiliation by openly laughing in their face.

That said, I laughed at a student last week. I couldn't help it. Stuff was funny.

The student in question self-identified as a Republican and voiced concern about the apparent popularity of Sarah Palin in his party. He spoke quite negatively about her and expressed dismay about her lofty status among the party faithful. This touched on one of the course themes, perception and reality in politics, so I responded by asking what caused him to conclude that she was wildly popular among Republicans. He said, "Well, whenever I'm watching Fox News they just go on and on about her, and everything they say is positive."

The class laughed. I laughed. Not a lot, but more than I should have (i.e., more than zero). The student did not realize she was on the Fox payroll to the tune of several million dollars – Didn't that get a lot of publicity? Am I incorrect to think this might be common knowledge? – but we turned it into a fairly useful discussion about one of the maxims of public opinion in the age of electronic media: the loudest voices don't necessarily represent the greatest numbers of people. And I hate to bring them up two days in a row, but there is no better example of this right now than the Teabaggers. The early returns on Election 2010 underscore its status as a fringe movement. Prior to 1968, McGovern-Fraser, and the advent of primaries, the major parties nominated presidential candidates at the conventions. Amidst the back room dealings and corrupt bargains made among the delegates, powerful state and local party bosses would promise to "deliver" areas under their control if they got their way, i.e. "If you nominate ______ I can deliver California in November." Right now it's quite apparent that for all their demands of the establishment GOP, Tea Party USA can't deliver shit.

The success of Teabaggers in electing the candidates they anoint is meager at best, "totally non-existent" at worst (hat tip TS). From the Doug Hoffman fiasco in the NY-23 special election to the 2010 primaries, Tea Partiers have become the Washington Generals of contemporary elections. In my home state of Illinois, evil "RINO" Senate candidate Matt Kirk destroyed Teabagger Patrick Hughes for the Republican Senate nomination while Adam Andrzejewski parlayed endorsements from Rush Limbaugh, Erick Erickson of RedState.com, and every Teabagger alive into a fabulous 5th-place finish in the gubernatorial primary. Out of six candidates. If you ever question Rush Limbaugh's exaggerated sense of self-importance, just remember that his weighty name virtually guarantees you a top-5 finish in a field of six candidates in a Republican primary. The results were no better in Texas – Texas, for crap's sake – where Teabaggers failed spectacularly in their primary challenges of Governor Rick Perry and nearly a dozen House members. Not one came within 30 points of winning.

The media have latched onto the Tea Parties for their own self-serving reasons. The conservative media love them because the crowds of yokels satisfy the American right's desperate need for a veneer of working-class authenticity. The liberal and centrist media love the rallies because they are a petting zoo of deformed, barely literate freaks at which viewers will enjoy laughing. Regardless of how or why the media cynically exploit Teabaggers, the fact remains that there simply aren't that many of them. The fractured, incoherent movement is only "sweeping across America" or "a grassroots uprising" in the minds of people who think that wishing will make it so.

One of the good things about traveling is being exposed to the inevitable Fox News broadcast in the lobby during breakfast. I'm convinced that about a third of Fox's ratings "audience" is derived from bars, hotels, and retail establishments required, either by contract or courtesy of the ideological biases of the proprietor, to broadcast its unique brand of reality to helpless customers. Given that I was in South Carolina, the odds of watching something other than Fox and Friends during breakfast were about as good as my odds of winning Powerball.

Fox and Friends is special. If you've ever wanted to watch three spray-tan mannequins with gummy worm lips exchange "witty" "banter" about Hannity's talking points for the day, this is as close as you're going to get. Unsurprisingly, their deep concern for free speech and the tone of our public discourse was piqued by the recent incident at UC-Irvine in which Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was shouted down by the Muslim Student Union. What a bunch of uncivilized brown people. Can you imagine such behavior in a public forum?

I mean, aside from the people Fox has been hailing as the Great Patriots of America for the last year.

The best job in Rupert Murdoch's media empire has to be the Guy Who Rationalizes Obvious Hypocrisy. I mean, even the average shit-for-brains who watches Fox and Friends and listens to Neal Boortz is going to have some cognitive dissonance (despite being unable to spell or define either of those words). Either interrupting a public speaker by screaming at them is Patriotic or it is undemocratic and reprehensible. Can someone please rationalize how this is acceptable behavior among some (white) people and not among other (dark) people?

Hellz yeah we can.

"In the past year, Ambassador, we've seen a lot of, 'vocal' meetings with the town halls and the Tea Parties and stuff like that. That, that's spontaneous. You know. Whereas this, it appears as if…the Muslim Student Union out there, they had coordinated it."

So that's it. If it's "spontaneous" – i.e. if you have absolutely no control over your emotions and can't help lashing out in murderously uninformed rage at anyone who says something with which you disagree – you're golden. If said interruption is planned or coordinated in advance you're the enemy of free speech. Good thing teabagger meetings are neither planned nor coordinated in advance, nor are any agreed-upon talking points disseminated among a group of people who couldn't possibly construct their own ideas.

Thanks, Fox and Friends. You made what passes for breakfast at a Hampton Inn in Conway, SC downright nutritious, at least for my brain. No word yet from the Friends on that other "controversy" from the UC system. Funny, that.

Media coverage of disasters on television is formulaic. Consider hurricane coverage, for example. The cycle is well-established: start with shots of empty grocery store shelves (time to stock up!) and people boarding up windows. Throw in an interview with idiots who plan to "tough it out." Lots of cutaways to the storm-addled reporter giving important updates ("It's really windy, Bob! Back to you!") while getting pelted with 80 mph rain. After the storm serve up the oh-the-humanity destruction footage. And complete the cycle with a day of footage of and moral panic about looting. Gotta have the looting. There is no better indication of the class biases and motives of the mainstream media than its obsession with looting during times of unspeakable human tragedy.

It sure didn't take the cable news networks to move beyond the human suffering frame in Haiti to get to the important question: is the property OK? Matthew L. directed me to this piece about the media's obsession with the possibility that people might be taking things for which they did not pay. It is stunning how they can't connect the stories they run from one minute to the next; they leap from food shortages and international aid not getting through to the people of Haiti to tales of civil disorder and looting. Well, if people have no food or shelter they're probably going to take whatever they can find, right? This isn't a Sunday afternoon on Long Island. It's a country that was impoverished to begin with and it is in complete ruins. A little "looting" may be understandable given the circumstances. But God forbid the media get hold of footage of looters taking non-essentials (TVs and DVDs instead of food and medicine). Their contempt becomes almost too much to bear; it takes all the strength they can muster to refrain from saying, "Typical. Just typical. Stupid nig…Whoops, we're still on the air, aren't we?" over the footage.

The linked story goes to some lengths to justify the intent of the apparent looters – maybe the man taking fabric from a demolished store needs it to shelter his family from the sun. Maybe the people taking food have starving children. That line of argument is futile for two reasons. First, we'll never know the motives of the people we are observing. Second, who gives a shit? Whether these people are taking food from the rubble or breaking into an undamaged mall to steal cell phones, looting is about 37th on the list of Haiti's most important problems at the moment. The news is now full of stories of police shooting looters on sight (implicitly condoning the idea that every crime becomes a capital offense, no trial required, during a disaster). Is this a wise allocation of resources? There were still survivors in the rubble a week ago, not to mention tens of thousands of corpses ready to rot and kill more people with disease. I can think of a few things the police could be doing other than chasing looters. How is this a priority?

It becomes a priority when the media and governments from the so-called First World impose their twisted worldview on people who have just lost everything. Americans would rather be dead than have someone (black and poor) take their stuff. Isn't that what this kind of coverage is about? A lot of our voyeuristic obsession with disaster coverage is the implicit "This could happen to me" dynamic – but in the American context, "this" refers less to the natural disaster than to the horrifying prospect of life without our shit. Ironically, projecting that materialism onto the people of the poorest country in the hemisphere makes a lot less sense than the looting we see.

It is an inerrant fact that anything billed as "The conservative take on / version of _________" is going to be hilariously, perhaps even spectacularly, shit. The Half-Hour News Hour. Conservapedia. Qube TV. Pajamas Media. Conservative punk bands. Michael Steele. Take your pick, as they all have in common that special is-this-serious quality that, frankly, liberals can't do. And they all follow the same pattern: they make a lot of noise, the real media pay them a disproportionate amount of attention lest they be accused of "bias", and then the product in question quietly dies when the gawkers and snickering hipsters have disappeared.

When I first heard that Tucker Carlson was at long last establishing a presence on the internet – in related news, he has finally acquired a touch-tone phone – I assumed that he would fade seamlessly into the cacophony of screeching that is the wingnut underbelly of our electronic discourse. But he aimed high with The Daily Caller, billed modestly as the Conservative Answer to Huffington Post. I'm sure I've seen more underwhelming things but none spring to mind at the moment.

Short of a Flash banner at the top proclaiming "LOOK, WE ARE SIMPLY OUT OF IDEAS" the entire thing could not reek more of complete creative bankruptcy. From the instantly forgettable name – I guess "Tucker's Website" and "The Daily Internet Site" were already taken – to the "1997 called, it wants its web design back" layout, it is a case study in the inherent flaw in asking a bunch of College Republicans to come up with something slick and cutting edge. Their big roll-out event was a "Welcome to the internet!" courtesy piece by Arianna Huffington and a pair of columns from Andrew Breitbart (whose ghastly Breitbart.tv now has competition in the race to the bottom of the cultural barrel) and Rep. Pete Sessions.

Awesome.

Here's the best part: it has a full-time paid staff of 21. Unless Carlson is trying to set a new speed record for pissing through Koch Foundation money, I cannot conceive of a way that this thing will come close to breaking even. At a per-employee cost of, say, $70-$100k (counting all of the expenses beyond salary) I give this thing about six months before Phyllis Schlafly gets tired of flushing money down the toilet and the site goes the way of Google Answers.

The puzzling thing – and from the right's perspective, the sad thing – is that this is not a wholly untenable idea. It could work. There have been successes in the past marketing a higher-end conservative product, something slightly less stupid than Michelle Malkin and Free Republic. But this, to put it charitably, is just more of the same shit. What original content they offer is like the site itself – lame and uninspired. If Carlson thinks that the expense of this monstrosity is going to be subsidized by the public's insatiable desire to read the "diary" of S.E. "I've been to Rio. It's AWESOME." Cupp he is more ignorant of this newfangled internet thingy than we can imagine.

The key to anything financial – investing, opening a business, playing blackjack in Vegas – is to determine in advance exactly how much money one is willing to lose and adhering to that decision fastidiously. This wisdom is accepted across all ideologies. It is important because pride takes over once failure sets in, and individuals are apt to hold out hope for a successful turnaround well past the point of reason. You've seen people in casinos pour more and more money into "turning around" a bad night and recouping losses. We've seen successful businesspeople open a new retail outlet or create a new brand that fails; unwilling to wear the shame of failure they pour resources into it until, inevitably, the entire business empire collapses. You've seen investors (or perhaps you were that investor) ride a stock down to zero while desperately insisting that a turnaround is imminent. Without limiting your losses, they tend to be…well, unlimited.

So…about Fox Business Network. On one hand you have to be impressed with Rupert Murdoch's sheer willingness to shovel good money after bad. On the other we have to start questioning the one part of his persona that has heretofore been unquestioned – his business acumen. Say what we will about the man, he is a businessman and he knows how to make money (mostly by identifying the lowest common denominator, undercutting it by 50%, and making it louder). Until now, that is. Because FBN can't possibly be making enough money to pay my rent let alone its overhead.

How bad is it? Well…

True story: 2009 was a terrific year for ginandtacos.com. I started the year happily averaging 800-1000 hits daily and ended it close to 3500. Or as I prefer to call it, 10% of the daily nationwide audience of Fox Business Network. Seriously. They are averaging fewer than the 35,000 daily viewers necessary to be included in Nielsen ratings. So a network owned by one of the world's most powerful media entities, with daily operating costs that surely run to tens of thousands of dollars if not more, is achieving a grand total of ten times – at most – the audience of gin-and-frickin'-tacos. Total operating cost: $9 month. Eat it, Rupert.

It turns out that people interested in financial media are out to make money, not to hear cheerleading for a single ideological viewpoint. They want to know how to make a buck off Obama & Co., not to hear extended harangues about why everything he does is Evil. And I don't think the people in charge have the slightest idea of how little the intended audience wants to hear financial advice from idiots like S.E. Cupp, Sean Hannity, Jenna Lee, and Neil Cavuto. Their lineup makes Jim Cramer look like Keynes and Megan McArdle look like…someone who should probably be on FBN.

Is it going to drag down the entire NewsCorp empire? Doubtful. Its interests are diverse and many of them are very profitable. But at this point FBN is little more than an a vanity press for Murdoch. It is an expensive hobby, the kind into which we pour vast sums of money simply because we enjoy it, not because it makes any financial sense to do so. Most old white guys golf, buy Porsches, or collect rare something-or-others. Either FBN is Murdoch's version of a stamp collection or the amount of money he is comfortable losing on this "investment" was not determined in advance, hence we are watching pride and stubbornness take over.

Someone who wanted to be one heartbeat away from the presidency – and who fully intends to run for the top spot directly in 2012 – wrote the following:

Arrogant&Naive2say man overpwers nature. … Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng

As you no doubt can guess, this message is from the Gov. Quitter's "Twitter" feed. Yes, Sarah Palin is stupid but this type of communication is all too common on Twitter (if you want to gouge your eyes out, try taking a glance at some famous athletes' Twitter posts – it's about what you'd expect, only 1000 times worse). And that is why Twitter is going to be the final nail in the coffin of whatever remains of our collective writing skills.

I have a 6 year-old cell phone. It's ancient by the standards of cell phone technology. I send text messages on a plain numeric keypad; no fancy QWERTY keyboard for me. And I never fail to take the time to write out each word and use punctuation. The marginal cost of doing so is about 20% of whatever time you'd spend writing unreadable gibberish that sounds like a hyperactive tween emailing her friends about Twilight. And for people who have newfangled phones with keyboards it can't take any additional effort at all to write like a literate English speaker. Argue all you want – there is no justification for this level of stupidity. Unless one's typing skills are 4 WPM, it simply does not take any more time to type "will continue to see changes" in place of "will cont 2 c chnges."

Look again at Palin's message. When did it become acceptable to communicate like this? What kind of idiot would make such a thing public? Maybe other public figures avoid being this blatantly retarded but it doesn't take much time in the Twitterverse to understand that "ur" is a perfectly acceptable substitute for "your," punctuation is optional and may be used at random, and numbers may substitute for words or portions thereof.

If you think this doesn't matter and I'm just being a crank, let's wait a few more years until we can see the results of long-term studies of the effects of text messaging among adolescents on their adult writing skills. We can barely write as it is, and now the world is being swept by a medium that encourages, if not openly demands, illiterate drivel as an acceptable substitute for English. I'm not the first person to point at technological developments and say "This is the harbinger of our doom! The end is nigh!" and the track record of people who so claim is not good. But the effect these new forms of communication are having on our ability to use the old ones correctly is real and significant.

Take a stand. Do your part, however small, to send the message (see what I did there?) that this kind of shit is not acceptable. Let your acquaintances know that typing something on a cell phone is not a blanket excuse to sound retarded. I don't care if you're texting, emailing, tweeting, blogging, writing a letter, or scratching an SOS into the side of a coconut shell, there. is. no. excuse. for talking like this. None. Our time is not so precious that the millisecond saved by replacing "for" with "4" can be justified. It takes just a few moments more to say something correctly than to say it incorrectly. And if something isn't worth a few seconds to say correctly I would question whether it is worth saying at all.

It's no secret that traditional news media are in dire straits. Network television news has become almost completely irrelevant while 24-hour cable networks, the last innovation to revolutionize the way we consume news, are scrambling to recover the audience they're losing to the internet. If you don't believe me, try watching CNN until you hear the word "tweet" or "blog." It won't take more than five minutes. Radio has all but disappeared as a primary news source. And the newspaper industry…good lord. These are the end times for them. Circulation is down 7,000,000 per day since 1985 and in the past 12 months alone ad revenue has plummeted 19%. I've said enough over the years about the sorry state of print media, and it's nothing you don't already know if you've picked up a newspaper in the last few years. Even the New York Times is hurting, and lesser papers, the Chicago Tribune for example, are so thin they could scarcely provide enough square inches to serve as fish wrappers anymore.

Like the railroads or any other industry backed into a corner by technological changes making them obsolete, the traditional media are baring their claws and preparing for a fight – one of the vicious, desperate fight-for-your-life variety. The latest hue and cry focuses on the role of "aggregating" websites, places like Huffington Post or Digg which collect the most interesting bits from hundreds of sources and provide them free and without requiring a subscription. Ms. Huffington herself points out that:

So now sites that aggregate the news have become, in the words of Rupert Murdoch and his team, "parasites," "content kleptomaniacs," "vampires," "tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internets," and, of course, thieves who "steal all our copyright."

It is very convenient for the champions of the obsolete technology to vilify that which replaces them, and frankly their argument is not without merit. The internet is undercutting them precisely by providing more variety, as-it-happens delivery of breaking news, and a user-end cost of zero. Dozens of traditional media websites have attempted to set up "paywalls" – in other words, charging for access to content – and in nearly every instance the scheme failed miserably. Ironically it is the lack of rigor in the print media that undercut the attempts at paywalls; papers have gotten so lazy and so reliant on AP/Reuters/wire/syndication copy that a reader could simply steer away from pay sites and find literally the exact same story elsewhere gratis.

It's a compelling story, and a story as old as industrial society. New technology crushes old technology, the latter of which can offer little more than appeals to tradition and nostalgia. The internet killed off newspapers just as airlines and highways killed off the railroads, which killed off the steamboats, which killed off the keelboats, which killed off the Indians. But this explanation is far too convenient for the traditional media because it allows them to ignore their responsibility for their own demise. Yes, it's time for some victim-blaming.

The internet is not simply killing old media because it is newer-faster-cheaper. It is killing old media because it is providing a far better product. Wha-wha-what, you say? Yes, there certainly is a lot of shit on the internet. But consider this: on the two biggest news stories of this decade, and possibly of a generation, the traditional media absolutely and irrefutably failed us. Compare the performance of internet "news" – blogs, amateur journalists, basement and bedroom analysts – to the paper-and-ink media on the run up to the Iraq War and the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage-driven financial crisis.

Which media provided facts and which one toed the party line? Which media did the digging and fact-checking that is supposed to be the foundation of journalism and which one unquestioningly parroted Official Sources? Which one offered loud voices saying "Um, these claims about Iraq are utter bullshit" or "Hey, people should pay attention to this bomb that is about to detonate under our economy"?

God help me, I am about to use a football metaphor. An American football metaphor for those of you who think soccer is football.

The old media, at least after they decided to stop questioning Official Sources and serve as stenographers, are like one person trying to tackle a runner. If they miss the runner, no one else is there to tackle him. The internet is like a gang of tiny people trying to tackle the runner. One person can't do it. She'll bounce off, but she will slow him down just a bit. And then two more little people will jump on the him. And then ten more. And then a thousand. And before you know it, the runner is buried underneath thousands of little people.

The internet is flatly better at serving the purpose our media is supposed to serve. The traditional media run a headline – "IRAQ WAR CLAIMS MAY BE BULLSHIT" – and maybe it sticks, maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't, that's it. They move on, and their need for ratings and profit demand that they rapidly move on to something mindless but titillating. The internet, on the other hand, greatly reduces the odds of stories falling through the cracks. People swarm around stories that seem to have legs, re-posting and forwarding and generally doing a good job of getting more people to take notice. And therefore important stories might be brushed from the headlines but they don't just disappear.

I don't want to wax lyrical about the glories of internet journalism because I know just how much utter crap and misinformation circulates online. Yet no matter how disappointing the signal-to-noise ratio may be, there is some signal. If a story is relevant or newsworthy, someone will catch it. Someone will ask questions, do the fact-checking (thanks, Media Matters and FactCheck.org!) that the news media are supposed to do, and persist long after the newspapers and cable networks have decided that it is not ratings-friendly or in their financial interest to run stories about things people should know but prefer not to.

We all marvel at the ability of wingnuts to sell books to other wingnuts. You really have to hand it to people like Malkin, Beck, Coulter, and O'Reilly; they may be lacking in both sanity and brainpower but they know how to sell books. Yes, the sales figures for books like Going Rogue and Slander are fudged – many of the books purchased in bulk by chain stores and internet retailers are eventually returned unsold – but that does not change the fact that a lot of actual sales are taking place.

How do they do it? They do it the same way that McDonald's gets people to spend billions on food that is grotesquely unhealthy and doesn't even taste good – by delivering a cheap, consistent, and utterly predictable product to lazy people who like nothing better than mind-numbing routine. They have identified an audience that is willing to buy books, perhaps even eager to buy books, but insistent that the books contain no facts or opinions that are not already shared by author and reader alike. It doesn't make sense to you or I, but I think it's worth emphasizing that wingnut authors are not merely selling bile and predigested thought to both flatter and inflame the prejudices of their audience. They are also selling predictability. That is an underrated commodity. People don't just watch According to Jim and eat Twinkies because they're stupid; people do it because it protects them from the unfamiliar and delivers a product that will never, ever surprise them or make them think.

Sometimes, however, the wingnut money machine runs into a snag. Case in point: Glenn Beck's "Christmas Sweater" live show. It sold 17 tickets in New York. I know NYC is a tremendously liberal place, but in a city of 17 million it sold 17 tickets. Ditto Boston. Washington proved to be a real hotbed of Christmas Sweater fandom, selling 30 tickets. His best draw was in Seattle (70 tickets in a 450-seat venue). There are but a few potential explanations for the fact that a man who can sell a million books at the drop of a hat cannot attract enough ticket buyers to fill out a football team.

1. Mouthbreathers who buy Beck/Malkin/etc. books have a limit. They aren't bright but they're smart enough to realize that a Glenn Beck Christmas performance is going to be ass-breakingly terrible.

2. The show is guaranteed to flop in big cities but would have more success if it adopted the Palin Book Tour Strategy, i.e. appearing only in forlorn places where hopes and dreams congregate to die.

3. Beck fans simply are terrified of leaving their homes to be near other human beings and refuse to do so without a very good reason.

4. What exactly a Glenn Beck Christmas show might look like is unclear – Is it political? Is it a play? Comedy? Are there musical numbers? – and thus utterly unacceptable to a fan base that demands unwavering predictability.

I lean strongly toward #4, if only that the most logical choice, #1, would require me to give Beck fans credit for having some taste or intellect. That's not happening. No, this is about predictability. Like a McDonald's that decided to sell shepherd's pie and souvlaki, Beck's attempt to pad his wallet and stroke his ego falls flat because he neglected to understand how much of his appeal is tied up in his ability to deliver a consistent ration of shit. To many Americans the fact that it is consistent is appealing enough to outweigh the fact that it is shit.

(To any readers who have taken one of my classes, and I think there are a few out there, this is going to sound pretty familiar. Unless you slept through it or skipped class, in which case you should learn it now.)

Why are the media so ruthless in their mockery of Sarah Palin after six solid years of cheerleading the nation into the Iraq War, paving the way for two terms of Bush, and standing around thumb-in-ass as our financial system galloped toward oblivion? We could make a semantic argument about subtle differences in intelligence between Bush and Palin, for example, and concoct some ostensibly legitimate reason that the most recent President deserved to be taken seriously and Palin is a dipshit suspended over a dunk tank. That would be a waste of time. The answer is media bias.

Media bias is a very real phenomenon, but it isn't a political bias. When people hear the phrase they imagine the media having a political agenda and pushing an ideologically slanted product at unsuspecting viewers. That does not happen. Even at FOX. Media bias is commercial bias. The biggest influence on the product you read and see is the desire to make money – and that's why 'product' is the appropriate term.

You're not believing me about Fox News, are you? OK. So why does Fox News offer the most conservative product, stocked with plenty of "family values" talk and appeals to social/religious conservatives, while the Fox networks offer the raunchiest programming? Think about the crap on the F/X network or Fox – it's cartoons fueled by foul language and sex jokes as far as the eye can see. It's Temptation Island and The Littlest Bachelor. It's mindless T&A at every opportunity. They do it because they have a very keen sense of how to make money. They give the news watching public what it wants and they give people who don't care about news what they want. That it happens to be two different products is irrelevant.

What happened to Palin is little more than a cold business decision (while Fox doesn't outright hammer her very often, their preference for Romney, Huckabee, and other potential candidates in 2012 is explicit). And it's not hard to get out the message when they decide it's time to tear someone apart. Remember who the big-network and Important Print Journalists are – as Matt Taibbi points out, they're overwhelmingly sons and daughters of the wealthy, people who went from boarding schools to the Ivy League to unpaid "internships" on mom and pop's dime. Their entire lives have been one extended exercise in either explicitly kissing the asses of or not having the balls to disagree with their social and economic betters. So our media, being entirely controlled by about five corporate entities, make decisions at the top that are rapidly disseminated to legions of journalists eager to please anyone with editorial or financial power over them.

That is why our media flap so helplessly in the wind, going from rabidly pro-war and dismissive of traitor pussy liberal protesters to fawning over Obama and matter-of-factly discussing Iraq as our greatest national mistake. It's just business. They figure out what their consumers want no differently than The Gap tries to figure out what sweaters you'll buy next fall. Is it really so simple? Yes. I believe it is. The media serve a public purpose but they are not public servants. They are out to make money, and they ride bandwagons. In early 2008, establishment mascot Hillary Clinton was the presumptive nominee and Obama was some inexperienced rookie under the thumb of a racist preacher. When it became impossible to ignore the flaming wreck that was the Clinton campaign they turned on a dime and started the Obama the Anointed One narrative. It happens quickly.

I like Taibbi's conclusion, as it is a far clearer and more succinct version of a point I've tried to make for years: Teabaggers should be taking note of what the treatment of Palin really means. It doesn't mean that a couple of talking heads decided to bash her for cheap laughs and ratings. The entire media are using her as a punching bag. And the Beltway insiders and their corporate bosses in New York don't whack people without getting the blessing of all five families, so to speak. They have received a unanimous signal – from the establishment GOP, Wall Street, campaign donors, and everyone else who matters to big media – that it is open season on the idiot from Alaska. She is poison, and the legions of Beck-Bachmann-Palin acolytes are not to be taken seriously. Like the anti-war left circa 2002, Teabaggers exist only to be mocked and occasionally manipulated for ratings.

Palin would do well to remember the Abe Vigoda's remark to Robert Duvall at the end of The Godfather as the former was about to be executed. It's just business, Sarah, nothing personal.