I take no pleasure in the misery of others, but as someone who recognizes that the mainstream media is the arch-villain in the fight for human liberty and the survival of an America that doesn’t resemble a European socialist country – yesterday, it was impossible for my heart to do anything other than leap for joy when I read that the New York Times lost $40 million in 2011.

No one wants to see anyone lose their job, but the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, and all the rest are nothing more than lairs for arch-villains, and when these hollowed-out volcanoes are bankrupted, the virtue of this outweighs what happens to the faceless henchmen who are now out on the streets looking for work. I wish them luck. I wish things were different. But this is about saving our country and humanity.

Over in England, some are openly panicking over the future of newspapers:

“Scum” shouts a passerby at the infiltrators who now feel so emboldened, so confident of their ultimate victory, that on Sept. 11, they feel free to do this absolutely unopposed, with the media lovingly recording their every word:

This is what cultural suicide looks like.

There’s no better proof that, while the Soviet Union may have disappeared, its malevolent ideals still live on, than to observe that neither the word “socialist” nor “Marxist” has fallen into ill-repute, or become an all-purpose insult like “Nazi.” This is partly due to academe’s unrequited lust for the Soviet system, and the continued presence of Soviet-bred sleeper agents — what the Russians called their “illegals” program — within the larger American society. Nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War, we still haven’t fully grasped the extent of the Marxist-Leninist evil — nor how it continues to this day.

Which is why this piece in the indispensable City Journal by Claire Berlinski is today’s must-read:

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.

(more…)

May Day is upon us – the day when the Communists, Socialists, Marxists and other nuts take to the streets to protest capitalism, individual freedom and America. Coincidentally – I’m sure – it’s the same day immigration reform advocates will be marching en masse across America demanding amnesty for illegals.

New York Times, MSNBC, Washington Post and CNN, do us all a favor: Can you compare the incidences of violence committed by radical Leftists on May Day to those (lack of) stories of violence during the Tax Day Tea Party protests?

Perhaps Bill Clinton, who recently inferred that the Tea Party protests and limited government pundits are leading America towards “violence,” would care to offer his analysis of the violence that is to come on May Day in major cities across America and Europe. Maybe he’d be interested in commenting for a compare/contrast story? New York Times and MSNBC: pick up your pencil and write that down. (more…)

The flashy British tabloid the Daily Mirror and America’s so-called newspaper of record, the New York Times, would seem to represent opposite ends of the MSM.  Yet in the third week of January 2009, as two of their respective columnists rendered verdict on the outgoing president George W. Bush, the two papers seemed barely a bitch slap apart.

On one side of the Atlantic, writing for the fish-and-chips crowd, Tony Parsons declared Bush “the global village idiot,” “a 10th-rate President for a nation in decline,” “a natural simpleton, a rich man’s son who got to the Oval Office on his daddy’s shirttails.”  Meanwhile, in the learned pages of the Gray Lady, Maureen Dowd dropped the guillotine, deriding Bush as “the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance,” “Oedipally oddball,” “an asphyxiated and pampered son.”

Now that is all clever stuff, sure to win a round on the house at the MSM bar, where everybody knows that the Nobel Laureate out of Chicago will be remembered as a better president than the one-time drunk driver from Texas.

But the view from the future will likely be a different one.  The notions of Parsons and Dowd, like so much of the MSM storyboard, shall be of scant interest to presidential historians.  Instead the media’s decade of rage at George W. Bush will be written about by doctoral candidates in social psychology under the title “5 million minutes of hate.” (more…)

A quote often attributed to Otto Von Bismarck in the 1930s — but really belonging to poet John Godfrey Saxe over 60 years earlier — tells us that “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”

“Original Old Media reporting” belongs on Saxe’s list.

In all three cases, the temptation to look away is great. In all three, we must resist. All require strong surveillance to ensure a quality product.

For all of their considerable accomplishments, New Media watchdogs have not done a particularly good job of proactively monitoring wire service and other original-source stories as they move through the assembly line from breaking news to supposedly settled narrative. As a result, as often occurs when legislators and sausage plants aren’t closely watched, product quality is often pathetic, and is sometimes downright dangerous. (more…)