Kick 'Em When They're Up; Kick 'Em When They're Down...

Ah, a snowy Tuesday morning! I'm much more sanguine than usual because I hired a snow removal service to come plow the driveway as soon as it hits five inches. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

There's a really nice piece on the Bainbridge blog about how the current blog challenge to MSM is the result of the institutionalization of the '60's radical mindset within the media itself:

And so the media has reaped what it sowed. The media legitimated and perpetuated the Sixties' radicals critique of authority. In doing so, however, it sowed the seeds of its own loss of authority. Since some of those seeds turned out to be dragons' teeth, the media is now reaping the whirlwind.

It couldn't be happening to a nicer bunch of people.

I saw this myself as I came up through newspapers in the early 1970s. When Nixon resigned, the editor of the small paper I worked for in Florida made up copies of the front page (much harder and more expensive then than now!) and gave one to each of us reporters so we would always remember what we were doing when this ultimate journalists' trophy was bagged.

Implicit in this, of course, was the idea that each and every one of us starting counting coup. That launched me on a year-long campaign as an "investigative reporter" in the zillions of small Florida towns that make up the Tampa/St. Pete metro area. My job description was "hit man" — I was rotated into a small town, where I started sifting through the dirt until I found something dirty enough to drag into the light. Then I methodically pounded the offending individual into a resignation...or worse. I remember sitting in some nickel-and-dime city hall watching some functionary cry and show me pictures of his college age daughters, people whose lives I was getting ready to trash. And then they rotated me out, so I didn't have to see the wreckage I left behind. Oh, I was a smug son of a bitch!

One morning I woke up and realized that I had become exactly the person I didn't want to be. I was one of the scumbags. So I went in and demanded a transfer to Features, which was met with a stunned silence. I had scalps! Within a few months, I had quit newspapers forever and begun my haphazard drift through popular culture as a freelance writer.

What does all this have to do with anything? Nothing, but, hey, it's snowing hard...