UPI, how much longer are you going to let this senile old bat cripple your brand? You could get a high-school kid for a quarter the price who could actually ask coherent questions and file intelligent reporting.
Why do the heathenprofessors rage? Amity Shlaes explains. I've watched Glenn Beck a couple of times now that I can hear what the guy is actually saying (we had Fox News on at H&R Block, but kept the sound off) and don't see what all the fuss is about. The guy is no more whacked-out than Sean Hannity or Mark Levin or any other half-dozen conservative talk-show guys; it's obvious, though, that he takes this notion of an America slowly sliding/being pushed further into socialism very seriously. So do a lot of people in his audience and elsewhere. It's interesting that Shlaes mentions the fact that Beck and others like him ultimately pose an existential threat to the dominant media/academic culture's paradigm of American history. To me, this dovetails with the increase in home-schooling and the spread of serious business colleges for profit. It also ties in with what Cobb is saying here about the challenge posed to colleges by the Internet and its legions of bloggers, many of whom have taken up freelance reporting as a side line and a few even as a main line.* The revolution in news is already underway, is being televised, and will eventually end in the death of newspapers, news magazines, and TV news divisions who are already staggering along despite deep cuts into the muscle of their reporting staffs. We are seeing the education revolutionaries coming out of the jungles and taking over villages, and like their journalist comrades, the educrats don't have a clue how to effectively deal with these people except through applying the blunt force of the law where they can. We'll see how well it works for the liberal arts colleges; certainly, getting in bed with the politicians hasn't helped journalism a damn bit.
amused