Via Brad DeLong…  Yes…the Internet probably plays its part.  But there is no doubt that a sizable portion of old media’s audience is being driven away from it, by the stench of rot.  Delong Quotes Tristero over at Digby’s Hullabaloo…

And in fact the sheer mediocrity of print columnists – Friedman – as well as their blithering stupidity – Brooks – surely must be a factor in the decline of newspaper readership… As for Jon Chait, well… he supported the war when he should have known better. There’s a myth that simply won’t die, that the horror we see today in Iraq was unpredictable. Here’s Nora Ephron’s version:

[Tenet and Powell] couldn’t have known at that time [Powell’s infamous UN speech] that the war would be such an unmitigated disaster; they surely couldn’t have known that there wouldn’t even be a July 4th sparkler found in all of Iraq…

Well, actually, they could have and should have. And so should have Chait. I suppose it’s not fair to dismiss someone’s entire corpus of opinion-making because they happened to make one itty-bitty mistake about something like an illegal, immoral, totally unjustifiable invasion of a foreign country that – no matter how depraved the leadership might be – never attacked the US and had nothing to do whatsoever with 9/11. But that’s just the way I am. After William Buckley called for all HIV positive people to be tattooed on their buttocks – yes, he did, you can look it up – it should have been quite clear to anyone with a brain that you could get more coherent political and cultural commentary from reading Mad Magazine than the National Review. Similarly, when Chait supported Bush/Iraq.

As I’ve said before, there is a serious intellectual crisis in this country. Bush/Iraq – especially the failure of the media to catch on before it was too late – is a direct consequence of that. That folks like Chait still command enough respect to have the opportunity to write cover articles for the New Republic – on any subject – while those who were absolutely right about this debacle from the start are still all but completely ignored by "respectable" opinion-making journalism should be cause for genuine alarm. Without truly intelligent, educated, and street-smart voices available to raise a… hullabaloo before it’s too late, this country is almost guaranteed to repeat the spectacular debacle of Iraq in the near future. And I don’t see enough of those voices in the mainstream political discourse.

To which DeLong adds: 

I remember Powell’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Wilkerson, saying that the night and he and Colin Powell worked on Powell’s speech was the worst night of his life–that they knew at the time that they were doing something very evil.

Yup.  And they did it anyway.  Tells you all you need to know about them.  And the fact that the mainstream news media actively looked the other way while they did it, tells you all you need to know about Them. 

How did it all come to this?  Well…

I think one of the most telling moments in Bill Moyers’ Iraq/media show was this one.

WALTER ISAACSON: We’d put it on the air and by nature of a 24 hour TV network, it was replaying over and over again. So, you would get phone calls. You would get advertisers. You would get the Administration.

BILL MOYERS: You said pressure from advertisers?WALTER ISAACSON: Not direct pressure from advertisers, but big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.’

So, "big people in corporations" get to call up CNN and tell them what they should be doing with their news coverage.

If you haven’t watched the most recent Bill Moyers Journal, Buying The War, and you’ve got a strong stomach, you can watch it online, Here.  At least until the republicans manage to finally pull the plug on PBS…