In a peculiar mix of unremarkable but real insight and blinkered doltishness in today's New York Times,
Frank Rich uses James Carville and Paul Begala's occasional advising role in the Kerry campaign to conclude that CNN is "now as inextricably bound to the Democrats as Fox is to the Republicans." And while making this ludicrous charge, he pens not a word about Wolf Blitzer's all-but-paid position with the Dear Leader crowd (or, for that matter, Joe Scarborough's role in the Bush campaign over at MSNBC).
Rich's purpose seems to be to argue that TV needs to turn to "hard-hitting, trustworthy news" to provide an alternative to Fox's all-Rethuglican-all-the-time approach rather than turn into Fox Lite or a Democratic shill like CNN (!). In making the argument, he by implication lets his own august, hard-hitting, trustworthy publication off the hook by citing the "major newspapers " that "have since worked hard to compensate for their pre-war lapses." With this statement, Rich demonstrates either a gullibility that undermines his credibility or a willful blindness to the garbage dump in which he stands that permits him to hold his nose at the stench from across the way.
Rich does provide a justifiable, though hardly fresh, critique of the disastrous performance of the mainstream press during the Bush hegemony. But he frames it in a headline-producing tribute to the righteousness of Bill O'Reilly (including the jump head, so it appears on two pages) in calling out CNN for its turn to the left and a concluding gratuitous slam at the "self-immolating" Kerry campaign.
With this childish hissy-fit, Rich perhaps permanently stains his credentials as a worthy critic of anything. More important to position himself as loftily above the fray - except, of course for his ingratiating, obsequious nod to his employer's wise path to redemption - than to use the Carville-Begala enlistment in the Kerry army to discuss the serious issues raised by the sordid marriage of scorched-earth politics and corporate-greed media.