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Nevertheless, we should be grateful to [Comedy Central's] jelly-spined executives for reminding us that the cardboard heroes of the American media are your go-to guys for standing up to entirely fictitious threats. But for real ones? Not so much.

As a youth I had a black cocker spaniel who would make a fuss if the mailman came, but if a stranger showed up he would just wag his tail. I have often thought that when "the cardboard heroes of the American media" look in the mirror they should see, not a "watchdog," but the visiage of my dog.
The reason American journalists set themselves up as "cardboard heroes" is painfully obvious - because they can. What could be more obvious than that it is profitable to do so? And what could be more obvious than that they can get away with it because they are in cahoots with each other - and that the mechanism which enabled and promoted their cooperation is the news service in general and the Associated Press in particular.
For protection from real threats, you want the kind of person who goes to church to be reminded of the transcendent - and who takes a camera to a Tea Party rally in Washington wondering if anyone else will be there but Obama goons.

Since I began reporting for my own newsblog last summer, it has been fascinating to watch the actions and reporting of the “real” media with regard to local government - city hall, county commission, school board.

It is obvious the other media have been properly “domesticated” by the politicians and seldom report anything controversial or upsetting to the local Power Structure.

It’s a hoot to witness it all close up.

Nevertheless, we should be grateful to [Comedy Central's] jelly-spined executives for reminding us that the cardboard heroes of the American media are your go-to guys for standing up to entirely fictitious threats. But for real ones? Not so much.
How long have we known that "the American media" and "liberals" were joined at the hip? But we have struggled to articulate exactly why and how that is so. Here, Mark Steyn crystalizes the reason.
The thing that unifies American "liberals" and American journalism and is that each, in his own way, systematically makes fictitious "threats" out of entirely unthreatening fellow citizens and then "rescues" us from them. All "liberals," whether journalists (who assign the laurel "objective" exclusively to themselves) or politicians or intellectuals (whom journalists assign the laurels ("liberal," "progressive," or "moderate" according to what will the public will receive best) are natural allies in the endeavor to bring entirely safe phantom "threats" to light, and to book.
Cardboard heroes, every man Jack of them.

The Right to Know