A couple of things really jumped out at me this weekend.

I was listening to some commentary from Juan Williams who considered the prospects of the general election in terms of Obama's presence, charisma and fluid speaking style--constrasting it with John McCain's, hunched, halting and ineloquent recent speech. For Williams, and I imagine for most liberals, its all about style. For me, and I imagine most conservatives, its all about substance. John McCain won the Republican nomination because for better or worse, he appeared to most voters as the most substantive candidate. If it was a matter of style, Huckabee would now be looking for a running mate.

Who wins this argument? I don't rightly know. Are more people fascinated with style or impressed with substance? The polls appear to suggest that substance still rules the day, but I concede the significant difference between polls and elections. My dread of an Obama presidency is similarly less about him and what he would do, and more a concern with whether America has lost its soul. If it really is an MTV country, we are all screwed.

The second thing concerned the backstory on Bitterquiddick. Mayhill Flower (...and its not a pen name...) is a blogger, and not a particularly well-known one at that. She nevertheless has produced two earth-shaking scoops. The first of course was Obama's characterization of middle America as bitter and irrational, clinging to guns and religion rather than worshipping at the altar of the omnipotent state. The second was Bill Clinton's bitter, and perhaps understandable harangue of the editors of Vanity Fair, who last week published rumors of unabated promiscuity on the campaign trail.

She recounts how she got the Obama scoop.

In April, Fowler asked a friend who raises money for Obama if she could attend a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco. "I've given the max to the campaign," she reminded the friend.

Fowler had her tape recorder going when the candidate made his ill-fated remarks about frustrated small-town residents turning to guns, God or anti-immigrant sentiments. The woman who had viewed Obama as a unifier was taken aback.

"I thought, he really doesn't understand these people, and he's confirming the worst stereotype this audience has of these people, and that's something I've been fighting against since I moved to California in 1968."

When Fowler quickly posted some other Obama remarks, about what he wanted in a running mate, her fundraising friend called and scolded her. But Fowler was still wrestling with the "bitter" comments. She played the tape for her husband, Jim, who didn't think it was a big deal. But Fowler says she knew it would be "devastating" to Obama.

Lets analyze.

It becomes apparent that she got the story because she looked harmless--an Obama contributor blogging for an Obama-friendly forum. Similarly, she got the Clinton rant because he thought she was simply a supporter.

Hurrah for the good guys, i.e. bloggers, but several things about the Obama episode in particular were very, very disturbing on the broad cultural level.

When Michel, her supervisor, called to ask what else was on the tape, Fowler said there was more newsworthy audio but that she was not going to provide it. They fell into an hour-long discussion about the nature of journalism.

"It's ultimately your decision," Michel recalls saying. "But if you decide not to share it, and you make the decision only to publish what you believe favors Barack Obama, you put me in an impossible position as an editor."

On a flight the next day, "at 32,000 feet, the piece just appeared in my head," Fowler says. But she decided not to submit it for two more days, figuring that if the story appeared in the Huffington Post on Friday it would be "buried" over the weekend -- a common tactic for politicians trying to minimize unfavorable news.

1. Obama's audience is so bigoted and ignorant--which of course means the same thing, that they simply did not recognize the gravity of Obama's remarks because it was already an article of faith with them.

2. The second possibility is considerably worse--the audience understood that Obama's remarks were bigoted, hateful and ignorant and didn't necessarily agree, but decided to enter a conspiracy of silence about the candidate's real attitudes in order to obtain political advantages for themselves at the expense of the whole nation.

That is uncomfortably close to the political climate that existed before the civil war, where political divisions served to dehumanize fellow citizens to the point where it became possible to engage in fratricide.

UPDATE: Walter Shapiro from the liberal New Republic:

Through most of his inaugural primetime press conference, Barack Obama seemed like he was channeling a particularly loquacious combination of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and the ghost of Hubert Humphrey. The president's response to the first question from the Associated Press about the risks of sounding too apocalyptic about the economy ran (or, to be more accurate, crawled) for nearly 1,200 words--and ended with Obama saying "Okay" with an implicit question mark as if he were requesting permission to keep on talking. A national poll from the Pew Research Center released Monday afternoon found that 92 percent of Americans described Obama as a "good communicator." There is a suspicion that those astronomic numbers had dipped by the time that Obama exited from the East Room of the White House at 9 p.m. on the dot.

I had a long discussion with a former neighbor yesterday who insisted that the media will carry Obama on its shoulders to reelection. Well, you know me--I disagree, even vehemently. Shapiro's ambivalence is my currency.

Fabius Maximus enters once more into the breach to try to see what kind of news media will arise from the wreckage of the past 10 years.

The major news media are on a treadmill. Loss of credibility shrinks their audience, hence less revenue, hence reduced funding. Which reduces the quality of their product, hence even less audience. Worse is the loss of advertisers to new media (e.g., Craigslist and Google), which means less revenue, less funding for news collection, and smaller audiences.

I think I've gained a new perspective on news, living as I do, in my self-imposed "low information" universe.

What Fabius doesn't consider is whether we actually need anything to replace the old news media model at all.

Out of a fascination with the carrion bird convergence on the corpse of Michael Jackson, I watched and read some news this week and it was like visiting one's home after a long absence--I saw things I had never really paid attention to.

Out of the hundreds of hours of Michael Jackson coverage, many facts emerged--well, not many, but a handful nonetheless. Jackson was a half billion dollars in debt, which is fascinating, but not really relevant unless you loaned him money. His children were fathered by white men, which is admittedly curious, but pretty much useless information. Anything else? Probably, but just as irrelevant as the rest of it. It seems that I found out everything I needed to know in a fifteen second announcement on the radio while I was driving to Moab last weekend--Michael Jackson, dead at 50.

Its amazing to contemplate the scale of irrelevant coverage with respect to the actual useful news it was based on, and sobering to realize how little we'd miss if the legacy news media suddenly went dark.

Now consider the news coming out of Washington D.C. these days. Sarah Palin announces her resignation and everyone spends the next few days analyzing what she really meant and what the real motivations were. Governor Palin is a pretty straightforward gal, but she operates in a business where no one says what they mean and nothing is as it seems. Have you ever really believed that someone resigned to spend more time with their family?

The useful news in this case was that Sarah Palin had resigned. Everything else was pure conjecture. Once again a case of fifteen seconds of information being spun into several hundred hours of "coverage".

We simply don't need 99.999% of the so-called news that we currently get, and what we do need we get through our social networks. I had several texts about Michael Jackson's death, and saw many comments on Facebook--every single one of them had exactly as much real information in them as I saw from the so-called professional news media. I learned of Sarah Palin's resignation from a Facebook post by Mitt Romney's Facebook group. Information finds you these days--no one has to go looking for it.

I think what people are really saying when the mull over the future of the news media is, "How will the power elite influence the thinking of the nation's citizens without the near universal access they had with the old mass media?"

Things are tough all over.

The future of the news mass media is that it has no future. People are going to get their news the old fashioned way--mouth to ear, but they are going to do it using very high-tech equipment. The vestiges of the old regime will be on-line wonk redoubts (like this one!) where small audiences can read analysis and "expert" opinion.

I'm OK with that.

My experiment in low information living has revealed a couple of interesting dynamics. In spite of not reading a paper, watching cable news or surfing the blogs, I've still been getting the news. What I've been hearing and how I've been hearing it is the key to understanding why the Obama administration is at war with Fox News.

I'm getting the "news" from my friends, who are often getting it from their friends, who may or may not be getting it from a "legitimate" news source. I recently saw a post on my Facebook page of a political nature and out of curiosity, I decided to trace it back to its origins. Turns out that it was reposted three times before it found me with over 3,000 friends in the direct audience. I can't even begin to calculate how many other people got this "news" outside of the Facebook loop. Pretty impressive.

What is suggests in an incredible multiplier effect for media outlets like Fox News (or for that matter, MSNBC). The average audience for a prime-time Fox show is between a half-million and two million, but with the multiplier effect, the national reach is undoubted measured in the tens of millions, perhaps north of 100 million.

Its not only the word-of-mouth methodology for communicating the news, but what finally gets communicated.

A good example of this is the White House's exclusion of Fox from an interview with one of Obama's commissars. I found this distinctly amusing because of the role reversal. The incident, as reported, simply reinforced impressions a lot of people already had of the White House--impressions that they created with their statements about Fox and attempts to coerce other media outlets to boycott Fox stories. The goose-stepping sinestrosphere seethed with anger over the "unfairness" of the story, spinning various details into an exoneration.

A useless reaction, because all that got through the pipe was "White House denies Fox access to administration official".

Ultimately, in spite of our technology, we haven't progressed much beyond the medieval village in terms of our so-called journalism. Its still basically over-the-fence gossip that feeds the villagers biases. Politicians use that dynamic to advance their agendas, but they also get hoisted on their own petards.

I'm just happy that conservatives are learning to play the game.

He added: "Let’s face facts. A business model that assumes we can’t charge for the content we produce assumes that our content has no value in the online market.

Dow Jones encompasses the Wallstreet Journal, which does charge for on-line content, and makes a profit doing so.

"In pure economic terms, such a business model has to mean one of two things: Either there is no demand for the content or there are substitute suppliers of that content sufficient to drive the price almost to zero."

Ar-r-r-r, there's the rub!

For days at this points, I've been hearing serious conjecture about what is going on with Tiger Woods, and what was really behind a one-car accident on his own property. Someone should pay me to read this crap.

I've yet to see any mention of the East Anglia University smoking-gun emails that prove definitively that climate scientists have been bought off by social engineering interests. Where is the Peter Galbraith story about he and Joe Biden shilling for Kurd independence in exchange for a piece of the Iraqi oil action? Now those stories would have had value.

On the other hand, who might see value in keeping that information out of the papers and nightly newscasts?

Right.

Les Hinton blames "digital thieves" for the state of the newspaper industry today, but the reality is starting them right in the face. As the broadcast networks and cable news channels were breaking the news of the State Dinner party crashers, image after image of elite media notables flashed by, escorting their mates and dates across the red carpet. One has to wonder if a reporter who really did their job would be invited to the White House...I suspect they wouldn't be.

The problem isn't that the content doesn't have value, but that newspapers offer that value to their political masters rather than to their subscribers.