In Sunset Boulevard you couldn’t help but sympathize with Norma Desmond. She made nostalgia, senility and decrepitude slightly pitiable, but also charming.

The New York Times, its stock value in the cellar while squirming under the thumb of a foreign robber baron, makes the same thing shabby, malodorous and pathetic, especially as recently dramatized by its former senior editor, the embittered Howell Raines, wheezing piteously against his former competition. “Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post,” writes Raines in his Washington Post piece.

Raines implies that boosterism for a New York mayoral candidate is hideously tacky.  A truly world–class paper’s boosterism should be employed (apparently) to help Stalinists set up their killing fields and gulags. To wit: (more…)

NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd is a neo-Luddite and he doesn’t even know it. In a brief impromptu video clip, Todd said that, “there is no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it.”

So forget plagiarism, intentional misinformation, news fabrication -– remember the New York Times’s Jayson Blair? –- intentional shilling for a political philosophy or politician, and just plain incompetence. None, according to Todd, are as journalistically “criminal,” in the non-judicial sense, as taking a story cue from Matt Drudge.

Todd is replicating the two-hundred years old whine of the early 19th-century Luddites.  Here’s a brief reminder of the movement of British textile workers led by General Ned Ludd between 1811-1816: (more…)