Pardon me if this has already been diaried, but I just today got a chance to read a piece by Richard Posner in the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31POSNER.html?pagewanted=print on the effect of new media on mainstream news coverage.
While some of the discussion is reasonable and balanced, Posner's conclusions are absurd. An example:
"The mainstream media are predominantly liberal - in fact, more liberal than they used to be. But not because the politics of journalists have changed. Rather, because the rise of new media, itself mainly an economic rather than a political phenomenon, has caused polarization, pushing the already liberal media farther left."
More below
But the real doozy is this:
"The rise of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the left. CNN was going to lose many of its conservative viewers to Fox anyway, so it made sense to increase its appeal to its remaining viewers by catering more assiduously to their political preferences."
Huh? What CNN has he been watching for the last 8 years? I believe Media Matters has enough examples just in the past couple of years to utterly demolish this astoundingly disingenuous conclusion.
Update:
I see that Jack Shafer at Slate took Posner's idiotic and lazy article apart, piece by piece here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2123764/nav/tap2/