Царь пишет:

We again must point out that today’s mainstream media is probably the least skeptical, most easily fooled, and least educated group that it has ever been.

The Volgi is going to have to take issue with the last here (bold mine). Journalists nowadays are indisputably more educated than they have ever been. And to a large degree, that’s the cause of the former two.

As products of the university monoculture, they are smugly uncurious and believe themselves in possession of all the answers. Or, if they recognize that they don’t, they need merely go to the closest, similarly credentialed, preferably Ivy-League expert, and the answer will be provided. This is how you get the global-warming hoax taking on worldwide proportions: they trusted the experts. They slap “Question Authority” on their bumpers, but what they mean is, “I hate you, Mom & Dad!” They worship their authorities like supplicants waiting for moans from the Vocal Memnon.

You don’t get a job at the New York Times these days by being a teenage stringer who cuts his teeth at city hall or on the police beat, only to work your way up, gimlet eye and skepticism honed in the real world. No, you major in journalism or English lit at an Ivy, or maybe a second-tier school, get into Columbia Journalism School, write some pieces demonstrating your desire to “change the world”—in an engagé leftward manner, of course—and network through the alumni-association. If anything, your training has been counter-reality, living in an ivory tower learning to regurgitate refried Marxist crap for years.

The professionalization of journalism tracks pretty closely with the development of an insular, out-of-touch, overeducated, credulous “mainstream media.” Hang out at a bowling alley on league night, and you’ll hear more shrewd critiques of politicians than you will in a year of watching CNN. Sure, the bowling league will have a bunch of ignorant blowhards shooting their mouths off in spittle-flecked outrage and conspiratorial cynicism…but a lot fewer than MSNBC and unlike Keith Olbermann, they’ll buy you a beer…

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.