Happy New Year to all Chicagoboyz & Chicagoboyz readers. Thanks to those who agree with us, who disagree with us, and those who just pass through. May the next year be as full of Chicagoboyz cheer as the last. Thanks to those whose gift of wit makes us all grateful. Without Manolo, what would we know about style?
In case you missed two of Instapundit’s recent links, here they are to start the New Year with a smile.
No greater compliment: this has a John Cleese quality.
A more narrowly partisan take, with a young Bob Hope, quick with the quip.
Day by Day has been moving between Iraq & sex; his political humor, as usual, is sharp.
Beautiful Atrocities links to Tigerhawk, where a commentator compares NYTimes predictions noted by Tigerhawk with NY Times share prices.
Thanks! Happy new year to you and your family as well.
Oddly,Insta and so many others Right of Center badmouth the NY Times at every opportunity yet seem daily to read the paper they distain. Another gambit: badmouth main stream media, as though the blogs out there are to be filled with reliable commentary and insights and delightful writing. Not so. Many bad papers; many bad things in papers. But overall, blogs are not yet ready to replace the news that is to be found in the papers.
Your points about MSM not being always wrong and blogs not being always right are well take. However, are you not merely opposing one straw-man argument to another? Surely the question whether blogs are a replacement for other news sources is not the only or most important question.
I think the best approach is to read widely and take quality where one finds it. The NYT, for all its flaws, contains much that is worthwhile. However, the fact that it publishes some good articles does not mean that we should avoid criticizing its chronic, disgraceful reportorial tendentiousness.
No one expects the Times to have a crystal ball. Making two predictions that were off is not surprising. Predictions, however, are not reporting but commentary; the fact that the predictions can be predicted by a paper’s politics does undercut their validity and is likely to make the paper less useful as a source. This is not a blog saying, we are right. It is a matter of noting a correlation between such consistent positions and a sense that the newspaper is not a wise investment in terms of future growth.
And the irony of reporters whose questions of all politicians (as egregious when Clinton was in office as now, when applied to Demcrats as Republicans) are phrased in terms of the horse race rather than policies is that approach has been turned on them as they lose circulation. (The importance & omnipresence of political analysts as opposed to experts in the fields have grown during the last twenty years so not surprisingly critics analyze circulation rather than depth.)