The virtues of 'a pack not a herd'(Steyn's Thoughts on the MSM vs the Communication Revolution)

Man Leans Magazine ^ | Mark Steyn

[finnigan2]

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but what happened to all the mom 'n' pop stores? Go to Anytown, U.S.A. -- or Canada, or Belgium or Latvia -- and it's all Home Depot and Wal-Mart and Dunkin' Donuts. And yet there is a curious exception to this trend: the media. If the New York Times and ABC and Knight Ridder are the equivalent of the Wal-Marts and Home Depots, they're getting picked off five, 10, a hundred customers at a time by a gazillion mom 'n' pop outfits -- the Drudge Report, Power Line, realclearpolitics.com and a myriad of other Internet wallahs.

[T'wit]

Would that be MacLean's Magazine? Canadian. Been around a long time.

[Publius6961]

BUMP!

[Miss Marple]

What a great column! I'll have to look for Glenn Reynold's book.

It occurs to me that the Internet has not only taken a huge bite from the news media, but it has taken a chunk of the entertainment audience, as well. I no longer watch any television for entertainment; I would rather read the intenet sites I frequent. I watch television for information (History Channel, HGTV, Fox News) and we watch movies when we can find something worth watching. I haven't watched network television for about 4 years.

[T'wit]

Excellent column, full of ideas! Thanks for posting.

[misterrob]

ping for Steyn list

[finnigan2]

"Would that be MacLean's Magazine? Canadian. Been around a long time."

- Yes it's the same old mouldy rag - the "lean" in MacLean's stands for, "leans left". I stopped reading it years ago but they recently hired Steyn as a regular columnist and since he posts his articles on his web site, I read them.
Amusingly, he has been hired to write a book column but as you can see, he soon turns his book reviews into political tracts. I wonder how long he will last after McLean's catches on that they have let the fox loose in the hen house.

[Gritty]

Great article!

[eureka!]

marking for later

[NonZeroSum]

I'll have to look for Glenn Reynold's book.

It's not hard to find...

[jjmcgo]

You're missing My Name Is Earl. Another great episode last night.

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

What with Steyn writing a column; it might be worth while to pick up a MacLean's next time I'm in my dentist's waiting room.

MacLean's "leans left"; but, even worse that that it is the sort of "Marxism Lite" that passes for deep thought amongst members of the Birkenstock crowd at the local Starbucks.

Marxism lite as an editorial philosophy is bad enough -- but MacLean's substitutes psychobabble, and personality profiles of political leaders for meaningful analysis of policy options. I used to read it because it purported to be "Canada's news magazine". I stopped when I realized that it was not only biased, and uninformative -- but, it actually destroyed reader's ability to think rather than emote.

[finnigan2]

"...MacLean's substitutes psychobabble, and personality profiles of political leaders for meaningful analysis of policy options. I used to read it because it purported to be "Canada's news magazine". I stopped when I realized that it was not only biased, and uninformative -- but, it actually destroyed reader's ability to think rather than emote."

- Amen to that, brother.

[NZerFromHK]

It reads a bit like New Zealand's Listerner, a newsmagazine that has a heavy culture and literary focus: generally read by the artsy intellectuals crowd and so far-left that they will think Clinton is a warmonger that deserves to be tried for his imperialistic militarism. In other words, it is read by the heavily left-leaning among a population that is already more to the left than the US. After you read that you would have thought Time is a sensible publication and Britain's Economist is the most comnservative you can tolerate.

Mark Steyn writing for Macleans is a wild card. Perhaps the editorial team wants a token conservative there, perhaps the folks thought Steyn would limit his takes to book reviews on that magazine.

[decal]

The money paragraph:

"But perhaps the greatest long-term shift will be in our relationship to the state. The thought occurred to me watching Democratic party bigwigs campaigning during the 2004 election. Even though America had much lower unemployment than Canada, never mind France or Germany, John Kerry and Co. went around telling people that there are no jobs out there. And, seeing Democratic Senator John Edwards in an old mill town in New Hampshire, I saw what he was getting at. There are no jobs like the jobs your pa had, where you could go to the mill and do the same thing day in, day out for 45 years, and it made it so much easier for swanky senators come election time because there were large numbers of you losers all in the same place when they flew in for the campaign stop and the crowd was impressive, whereas now they have to prowl around town ferreting out small two- or three-man start-ups, which takes a lot longer and to be honest never looks so good on the news. Watching Senator Edwards pining for the mills, I wondered if he wasn't having a strange premonition of his own obsolescence. The rise of big business was also the rise of big government."

The party that recognizes this first will be the one that prevails. The GOP has a head start, but that's all.

[NZerFromHK]

A follow-up to post 15: there is a columnist who dabbles in New Zealand, Canada, and Britain's media circles. Notice which media she writes for?

http://www.sumnerburstyn.com/POV/about-barb.htm

Barbara Sumner Burstyn

New Zealand

1) New Zealand Herald
2) Sunday Star Times
3) New Zealand Listener
4) Urbis (designer magazine)
5) Unlimited (business magazine)
6) Panorama (Air New Zealand's inflight entertainment programme)
7) Metro
8) Investigate
9) Flash
10) Pulp and Loop
11) Grace and New Idea (women's magazine)

Canada

1) Montreal Gazette
2) Ottawa Citizen
3) MacLean's
4) Readers Digest (Canadian edition)

UK

Independent on Sunday

USA

1) Sailing
2) www.dissidentvoice.org
3) www.progressivetrail.org

(In other words, this is someone who is so out of sync within mainstream America that she can't even get an American MSM to publish her materials)

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

I like The Economist. They say their editorial policy is "liberal" -- in the classic sense of the word -- meaning favouring limited government, free markets and free trade. Their coverage is usually as objective as it gets these days & their analysis and opinion pieces are usually well reasoned. It's the only mainstream business magazine I trust.

[NZerFromHK]

By US standards the Economist is centrist, but interestingly in New Zealand it is definitely on the very conservative side of the political debates. A lot of US liberals would be judged moderately conservative and their moderates conservative in New Zealand or Canada.

[unsycophant]

It reads like an ad for Glenn Reynolds, but leaves out that they are both closely aligned now with Pajamas Media, the "new" media that basically operates like MSM-lite.