Yes, Howard Fineman is off his rocker. The Newsweek scribe and ubiquitous talking head is actually one of the better liberal scribblers out there. But the CBS fiasco has unhinged him.


Fineman correctly sees that the long dominance of the Mainstream Media is drawing to an end. But what does he blame? Not CBS’s reliance on bogus documents to break a story designed to oust George Bush from the presidency. Not the New York Times failure to detect a major plagiarist in its midst. No, Howard blames…the Bush administration. 


“A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don’t mean the Democrats,” writes Fineman. “I’m talking about the ’mainstream media,’ which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush’s Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox’s canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying  journalistic standards….”


But it’s not just the blame Bush aspect of Fineman’s piece that is so delicious: It’s his puffed up assessment of his own profession. You MUST read the whole piece, but here’s a yummy tidbit:


“At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history….”


Must be nice to think of yourself that way…


You might also want to check out this interview with National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez–she thinks it’s time to adopt the English mode. Journalists in England show their ideological colors. Of course, so does the American media–they just don’t mean to get caught.