Big Journalism to the Rescue!

I am so enthused about Andrew Breitbart's launch of this newest blog experience in the "BIG" world!  First of course was Big Hollywood,  Then there was Big Government.  Now, we have Big Journalism.  This ought to be a hit.  "Main Stream Media" journalism has been dying a slow death for years, and I can't pinpoint the beginning of it's sickness.  But MSM's death date accelerated rapidly during the 2008 Presidential campaign with the blatantly irresponsible favoritism toward the man who now holds the highest office in the country.  MSM has been on life support ever since, with random and arbitrary minor signs of life at mostly unpredictable intervals.  Big Journalism ought to serve as a obvious wall-mounted visible defibrillator for the near-dead MSM and their audience.  Too bad they're all mostly brain dead - there's no medical equipment equivalent for that.

Maureen Dowd/Frank Rich

Deep Thought of the Week 

Posted by Jake Boot Jan 7th 2010 at 9:05 am in New York Times 

For years, the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have played the same journalistic card trick: Take the hot button issue of the week, cross it with the latest pop culture reference and – voila! – Times readers are treated to columns that give the appearance of having some kind of deep-seated cultural insight.
The problem, however, is that their “insights” won’t stand up to any kind of serious analysis, and quickly reveal themselves to be shallow, glib, sophomoric, and perhaps worst of all, predictable.




(Several weeks ago, for example, Rich struggled to make the claim that the George Clooney film Up in the Air is the Grapes of Wrath for our times – which sounds pretty good, until one thinks about it for a moment: The film is about a guy who travels the country racking up frequent flier miles as he fires people; Steinbeck’s masterpiece is about the struggles of the Joads as they’ve lost their farm and their livelihoods, and set out for California, penniless. But such is what passes for insight at the Times – where the upper westsider who’s been forced to fire a maid is seen as the tragic victim in need of sympathy, rather than the out-of-work maid.)


In any case, this week’s award for the vapid pop cultural reference masquerading as insight goes to Ms. Dowd, for her New Years’ eve interview with Janet Napolitano, wherein she posed the following Big Question, which manages to be both frightfully naïve, yet ever so trendy at the same time: "Why is it so hard for those charged with keeping us safe to be as imaginative and innovative as filmmakers like James Cameron?"
Aw, shucks. When did The New York Times start sounding like Tiger Beat magazine?


SOURCE: http://bigjournalism.com/jboot/2010/01/07/maureen-downfrank-rich-deep-thought-of-the-week/