This Blog Remains Modest

Here’s confirmation that this blog can be on target. As my post “The MSM (Part I)” earlier suggested, Fox’s conservative bias is freeing the MSM to go more blatantly to the left, at least according to former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan (Wall Street Journal, 4.6.06):

Is the appointment of [well-known liberal] Katie [Couric] an acknowledgement by CBS that it doesn't feel it has to care anymore about political preferences, that the existence of Fox News Channel has in effect freed up the network broadcasts to be what you and I might call more politically tendentious and they might call edgy? . . . After all, if America is one big niche market, liberals make up a big niche.

And Tom Friedman, as I did (“A Good Fence, More Good Neighbors”), played his comments on immigration reform directly off Robert Frost’s line from “Mending Walls” that “Good fences make good neighbors” (New York Times, 4.6.06):

Good fences make good immigration policy. Fences make people more secure and able to think through this issue more calmly.

Friedman is probably also aware of the irony in so quoting Frost, whose poem is really about the sadness of building walls between people. In the case of Mexico though, strengthening the walls will help immigrants.

Friedman, bless him, in the same article becomes the first MSM commentator I've seen to view with alarm the non-stop demagogic filth daily pumped out by CNN’s Lou Dobbs. Dobbs already claims credit for killing the Dubai port deal, and is now going after illegal immigrants, in the name of protecting “middle class Americans.” Friedman alludes to Dobbs' sorry show when he writes:

Porous borders empower only anti-immigrant demagogues, like the shameful CNN, which dumbs down the whole debate.

Reportedly, Dobbs’ ratings are up since he began his demagoguery.