The End of 'Times'? Let's bloody well hope so

Eric Alterman, notorious Leftie, writing in The Nation, the ultra-left publication, on The End of Times?.  There's gloom in them thar newsrooms and in media conferences.  Except when the journos are reminded that they are Guardians of Democracy and an "intermediary and an interpreter between society and knowledge," as a Carnegie presenter in an "inspiring" lecture at the conference reminded them.  

I don't call that inspired.  I call it meglomania.   And then there are the excuses for the gloom.  It's the filthy profit margins demanded by Wall Street expectations that are costing jobs.   Not, of course, because those "consumers", ah, citizens, who resent the media assumption that they need an intermediary to knowledge just don't buy crap like The Nation (if you want to make a donation...) and the idiot savants like Eric Alterman.    Alterman works for MSNBC, the network that is hemorrhaging money like, as Dan Rather would say, a stuck pig on a buzz saw blade.  

Could it be that MSNBC is such a failure because of writers and thinkers like Alterman?  He seriously believes that every blog, every quasi-news outlet, every "fake" news site is parasitical on information gathered by newspapers and newsweeklies.  

Excuse me, but such outlets are the techno equivalent of the Letters to the Editor that used to -- used to -- provide the kind of feedback to newspapers and media outlets that made damn sure clueless meglomaniacs like Alterman never got beyond delivering the mail in the newsroom.  To better writers.  To people who could think.  To people who lived their lives outside of a Washington, D.C. cocktail party or a New York celeb event.

MSNBC is a colossal failure partly due to their reliance on the Eric Altermans and the Keith Obermann's who haven't a clue.  You can damn well believe that Alterman would want anyone, especially leftwing universities, buy out newspapers.  Lack of accountability is a trademark of both.  

Jack Shafer (see below) might have been responding to Alterman directly.