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.

Chris Christie confronts the New Jersey press:

I don't think I've ever seen a reaction to a politician like I witnessed with Sarah Palin. My wife and her friends were instantly captivated, and the left went absolutely bonkers, desperately trying to mitigate Palin's charismatic effect.

Perhaps no one manifests this obsession more prominently than Andrew Sullivan, who insisted that Trig, the Palin's Down syndrome son, was actually the child of the Palin's oldest daughter Bristol. Sullivan's evidence are three photographs where Palin doesn't appear to be eight months pregnant, and the fact that she was in labor 26 hours with her fifth child.

On the other hand, Sullivan never deals with a couple of major exculpatory facts, like Bristol Palin was already pregnant when Trig was born (Trig was born April 18, his nephew was born December 29th of the same year), and young women Bristol's age have about a one in 1250 chance of having a Down syndrome baby, while women older in 44 have a one in 25 chance.

Whatever the actual facts surrounding Trig birth, the main question for sane folks is, "why do we care?" Frankly I can't even imagine a scenario where it would make sense to fake a pregnancy and then surreptitiously adopt a Down syndrome baby.

The issue has "loser" written all over it, but Sullivan has doggedly maintained his indignant demeanor in spite of criticism by both right and left, and two years later, he's still insistent that he's the only fair-minded 'journalist' in the country and takes his liberal-progressive brethren to task for not backing him up.

Remember all those liberals and lefties huffily denouncing this blog's attempts to make sense of Sarah Palin's bizarre stories about the pregnancy and birth of her alleged fifth child? I was nuts, crazy, vile, disgusting, etc etc to indulge in what Dave Weigel, with no working knowledge of the story, calls "nonsense." You may also recall that the liberal media didn't touch this with a barge-pole - and still hasn't (apart from a NYT puff-piece that I found utterly credulous at the time). Newsweek has even put its entire reputation behind the details of the story as outlined in Going Rogue, without doing any independent reporting on the subject.

Ironically, the cold-shoulder has useful if for no other reason than to have Sullivan write this about his ideological confreres.

This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever. And people wonder how this farce of a candidate now controls one major political party and could well be our next president. One reason is that we do not have a functioning adversarial media uncorrupted by partisan loyalty and tactics.

The "Whose baby is he really" story is boring and irrelevant, but everything else about its coverage is fascinating, particularly the revelation that Andrew Sullivan is deeply irrational--not simply because his obsession with Trig Palin is pathological, but because in the same column, he criticizes the liberal media's herd instinct while at the same time expressing anger and disappointment that he was unable to stampede them on the story.

...and they wonder why no one listens to Air American or reads liberal magazines and newspapers.

Newsweek's upcoming issue:

Obviously an artifact of deep frustration by the left that they haven't been able to manage Obama's image to their liking, but I've been perplexed at their incredulity that this is happening to the Messiah--after all, Messianic messengers tend to end their careers on the run, in a prison or at the hands of executioners--sometimes all three.

What's become clear over the transition between the Bush and Obama administration is that while everyone would like to manipulate public opinion, everyone basically runs into the same problem. You can incite a mob to form, but you can't control it--and its collorary--one mob begets another.

60s anti-war protesters recreated their organizing techniques in the new millenia, using modern communication technologies to great effect, which in turn were the basis for the Tea Party's birth. In both cases, the elite's control of the traditional messaging apparatus was circumvented with the technological equivalent of a jungle telegraph.

Just as the ruling class thought they had co-opted new media with secret collaborations like journolist (among many others...), a true high-tech jungle telegraph emerged in the form of Facebook.

Something happened last week that turned the light-bulb on. An old friend I recently reconnected with on Facebook asked me a simple, but pregnant question: "Where do you get this stuff?"

She had unquestioningly accepted the mainstream media narrative for decades, only to discover an entire alternate universe of reporting and perspective in the minimalistic but regular postings on my Facebook page. What contributed to her awakening was the credibility of my sources (the page A-12 stuff the media prints but hopes you never read...) and the fact that it wasn't necessary to establish trust. Trust is implicit in the nature of our relationship.

Almost everyday, one of my Facebook friends reposts at least one of the articles that I've posted, suggesting an organic process of transmission that mathematically portends a reach far broader than anything the mainstream media could hope to accomplish directly. The great thing about this (depending on your point of view) is that I function as editor--deciding what pages page one, and what doesn't.

The bottom line is that there is virtually no way to hijack this particular jungle telegraph. You may wring your hands that nearly 20% of the public thinks the President is a Muslim, but there is literally nothing you can do about it because Obama has neither the trust or the access to effectively repudiate the claim.

The implications for future administrations are challenging to say the least.

Much is being written these days about the end of a distinction between public and private behavior. Google's CEO went so far as to suggest that a few years hence will see a strong trend towards legal name changes, as young people seek to escape their socially networked misspent youth for professional and political reasons. His larger message is important--technology has erased the traditional expectation of a public and private face. We will now only have one face and in all likelihood, the worse thing we've ever done will be the first thing people learn about us.

There is no reason to expect that this won't also be true for the political sphere as well and we are in fact seeing this in real time. The failure of the global warming hoax can be attributed to the impossibility of controlling information thoroughly enough to see such a monstrosity fully translated into national and international law. The incredibly aggressive effort to ram through Obamacare became a Pyrrhic victory, and a likely temporary Pyrrhic victory at its alleged benefits will be as illusory as the economic rebirth promised by the so-called stimulus.

Politicians may have to do something unprecedented--sell their propositions on the merits.