Sunday, November 08, 2009

Balance

The bubble around the Village is strong. (It is really tempting to muck up the metaphor by making a Prisoner reference, but I will refrain.)

But when you see a crack, it is worth noting.

TIME

Pretty plainly, Fox News is full of conservative opinion hosts, while its news wing has fixated on anti-Obama causes célèbres from ACORN to the tea-party protests. (Equally plainly, the White House is not concerned about fighting the bias of, say, MSNBC hosts who agree with it.) But Sean Hannity's Republicanism, Beck's populism and Mike Huckabee's Christian conservatism are very different — as are, say, Rachel Maddow's progressivism and Chris Matthews' Democratic insiderdom. American politics has civil libertarians and Wall Street conservatives and social-justice moralist-populists and much more.

And they all, in these unsettled times, have various issues with the centrist establishment — which has its own permutations and camps. All of this promises wild and interesting times for journalists to cover, but they won't be able to do it from the neutral center. Because there isn't one, and there never was.



Kinda funny he still feels the need to insert that parenthetical balancing crack about MSNBC. Or, was that an editor who put that in?