. . . he feels that the masses are idiots. . .

Well, he is at least somewhat correct. Look who the masses elected President of the United States.

Keep the ILLEGALS out, join NumbersUSA to send free faxes to your reps.

    Newspapers are only a method of information transfer.  It is a technology and an economic model that is not viable in todays world. 

I disagree MidAmerica. I used to enjoy reading my daily newspaper and not long ago I was never seen without a newspaper in my hand. Now I refuse to buy one and encourage people to boycott their local newspapers.

Why? Newspapers used to be informative and report the news. These days they are more interested in interpreting the news for us, making the news, and outright lying to push the political agenda du jour.

What good is it to read anything by Paul Mulshine if I'm going to get his sanitized, politically correct, opinion of what happened instead of the cold, hard, facts. Again, if I wanted to read what journalist are publishing today, I'd go to the "Fiction Section" of my local library.

It's "Political Correctness" that has destroyed the print media and they refuse to admit it.

Buying a newspaper is like paying somebody to lie to you. Let's turn the glass menagerie that is the new Kansas City Star building into a terrarium.

Halp me Pawl Mulsin a'm stuk and stoopid witout yer vershin av de Nooz.

As a balding man, I just can't take someone seriously when they think that growing longer hair is a great way to mask the receding hairline. With the available options that hair-challenged men have, growing the "flap" is probably worse than a rug or weave

His photo makes him looks like he's homeless, and he just woke up.

Dude, do yourself a favor and shave your head...if you can't stomach a bald head, then just keep it really short!!

I apologize to any and all that struggle with male pattern baldness. Make peace with it and get on with your life...if people only like you for your hair, then you've got some pretty crappy friends!

"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life." --Robert A. Heinlein, "Beyond This Horizon," 1942

I've never been a consistent reader of any newspapers. I live in NYC and occasionally read the Post.  Recouping from heart surgery last summer, that was my daily jaunt for a while, going down to the deli to buy the Post. The problem with the Post is that it borders on being a tabloid, like the National Inquirer.  What ever is the juiciest story and all the torrid photos to go along with it, is what you are forced to wade through to get to the columns you really want to read. But, better to wade through a few tabloid pages than to soil my hands by picking up a NYT. 

I think the internet is still evolving and the best is yet to come. I'm so thankful for NB, which has been invaluable in my learning how to filter out most of the bias in any msm headline/story/soundbite.  

IMO this is just a bunch of sour grapes on the part of Mr. Mulshine.  I'm sure he actually had to endure many years in college and on the job training to get to the heights that he's reached in his profession, and to see all this competition in the form of non-classically trained, arm chair, bloggers jumping into the middle of the information game, risking nothing more than the cost of a laptop, is no doubt painful.  

Politicians are trying to figure out ways to regulate our freedom herein, and Mulshine types will help them with slanted reporting of such efforts.  Regulation of internet access is something that I've been afraid of for damn near as long as I've been connected to the web.

... the background and qualifications of BARRKY the FAUX-PREZ.  Oh wait.  I guess I missed it already.

"He is certain that without the assistance of professional journalists we lowly citizens will never be able to find out what's going on in our local governments. This is because, he says, bloggers won't take the time and haven't the ability to, "sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up."

OK- would one of the "idiot...citizen journalists on the Internet" resident at MRC take a look at the following thoroughly researched and documented, cross checked, vetted, and all sides reported with nothing held back stories???

1.  h/t American Thinker:  The Death of Deep Throat and the Crisis of Journalism, a short piece linking to this fascinating essay by George Friedman at Stratfor.com:

The Washington Post created a morality play about an out-of-control government brought to heel by two young, enterprising journalists and a courageous newspaper. That simply wasn’t what happened. Instead, it was about the FBI using The Washington Post to leak information to destroy the president, and The Washington Post willingly serving as the conduit for that information while withholding an essential dimension of the story by concealing Deep Throat’s identity.

Journalists have celebrated the Post’s role in bringing down the president for a generation. Even after the revelation of Deep Throat’s identity in 2005, there was no serious soul-searching on the omission from the historical record. Without understanding the role played by Felt and the FBI in bringing Nixon down, Watergate cannot be understood completely. Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee were willingly used by Felt to destroy Nixon. The three acknowledged a secret source, but they did not reveal that the secret source was in operational control of the FBI. They did not reveal that the FBI was passing on the fruits of surveillance of the White House. They did not reveal the genesis of the fall of Nixon. They accepted the accolades while withholding an extraordinarily important fact, elevating their own role in the episode while distorting the actual dynamic of Nixon’s fall.

Absent any widespread reconsideration of the Post’s actions during Watergate in the three years since Felt’s identity became known, the press in Washington continues to serve as a conduit for leaks of secret information. They publish this information while protecting the leakers, and therefore the leakers’ motives. Rather than being a venue for the neutral reporting of events, journalism thus becomes the arena in which political power plays are executed. What appears to be enterprising journalism is in fact a symbiotic relationship between journalists and government factions. It may be the best path journalists have for acquiring secrets, but it creates a very partial record of events — especially since the origin of a leak frequently is much more important to the public than the leak itself.  (Scooter Libby, anyone?)

The Felt experience is part of an ongoing story in which journalists’ guarantees of anonymity to sources allow leakers to control the news process. (my emphasis)

As a regular "idiot" and by no means a journalist, what immediately comes to mind, and seems to be glossed over by Friedman, is that Kennedy, Johnson, probably Roosevelt too, were all guilty of everything, and maybe more, that Nixon was guilty of.  The thing that really alowed Nixon to be brought down though, was that he was Republican, as well as his history of fighting communism, both major sins in the elite liberal world of the beltway.

2.  Here is one that has galled me ever since I saw it in NB:

WashPost Publisher Admitted Media Leak To Blame for Marine Barracks Bombing

Tragically, however, we in the media have made mistakes. You may recall that in April 1983, some 60 people were killed in a bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut. At the time, there was coded radio traffic between Syria, where the operation was being run, and Iran, which was supporting it. Alas, one television network and a newspaper columnist reported that the U.S. government had intercepted the traffic. Shortly thereafter the traffic ceased. This undermined efforts to capture the terrorist leaders and eliminated a source of information about future attacks. Five months later, apparently the same terrorists struck again at the Marine barracks in Beirut; 241 servicemen were killed.

This kind of result, albeit unintentional, points up the necessity for full cooperation wherever possible between the media and the authorities. When the media obtains especially sensitive information, we are willing to tell the authorities what we have learned and what we plan to report. And while reserving the right to make the final decision ourselves, we are anxious to listen to arguments about why information should not be aired.

Your right to make the final decision.  Granted by the founders, and wich you consistently use to your advantage.  You manipulate the stories while appearing to make every attempt to be objective.  You use the Constitutionally granted right to tell the story to obfuscate the actual truth so that it fits your politically motivated agenda.

BTW, Mr. Mulshine:  I can spell P-U-N-D-I-T.  It goes like this:  I-D-I-O-T  A-R-R-O-G-A-N-T  W-A-N-N-A  B-E  J-O-U-R-N-A-L-I-S-T.

"The future is not set.  There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."

michaelyon-online.com

But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader.

  Cut him a break. It is not like everyone in the U.S. gets at least 12 years of english classes.

  It is the business model. I buy a newspaper for NEWS. What do I get for my buck something?

Sports - toss in the garbage.

Metro - toss in the garbage.

Comics - toss in the garbage.

Classifieds - toss in the garbage.

Arts - - toss in the garbage.

tv schedule, movie schedule - toss in the garbage.

Bias op/ed pieces - toss in the garbage.

Sincerely,

a Veteran of a 1000 psychic wars.

"Mulshine assures us all that, Mencken-like, he feels that the masses are idiots"

He reflects the attitude (lack of respect) that most of the MSM has toward the public.  Like the typical liberal, he believes he is smarter, better informed and therefore completely righteous in his manipulation of them for their own good.  Of course it is the public's fault for him and his buddies loosing their jobs.  Must be frustrating for him, no one appreciates their condescending concern for the masses.

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, starving the poor one gallon of ethanol at a time. Fill your tank with E85 and cull a village.

Since half of the people are below average, it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a few more to justify his statement that we're stupid. What excuse do the highly trained professional MSMs have for their seditious and treasonous reporting? Is it too much to require that the President of the United States of America be able to pass a security screening? Is it too much to expect that the President's friends not be thugs, felons, and urban terrorists? Evidently, but you would never hear a word about substantive aspects of Obama's past and his relationships from our press. 

Miss them? Miss what?  Why should we miss indoctrination and propaganda specialists hell-bent at seeing someone elected who believes in very little of what we are. 

If I wrote for a Newark, New Jersey newspaper, I'd be angry and bitter too. Why do they even need a newspaper in Newark - to keep track of the murders?

The "Mainstream" Media: By liberals. For liberals.

Did anyone else catch Mulshine prominently featuring two homosexuals from New Jersey?

Jim McGreevey and Walt Whitman...

By the way, the Star-Ledger won their Pulitzer on their reporting only after McGreevey announced on national TV he was "a homosexual American."

Compare the treatment Mulshine and the other denizens of the Star-Ledger gave McGreevey before he "came out of the closet" to that of the Boise paper spending six months investigating rumors that Larry Craig is gay.

Please visit my Home Page at http://users.snip.ne...

Hey, Scoop!  Worried about losing your cushy job because we simply don't need nor want your kind anymore?

What on earth makes these so-called journalists any wiser than the rest of us is something I'll never be able to figure out.  From what I've seen, they're amazingly unknowledgeable and can't really write all that well either.

So, getting a paycheck from a news medium somehow imparts the same knowledge and deep insight that becoming famous in Hollywood or strumming a guitar on a stage does I guess.

One of the 24% who thinks George W. Bush was a great President. One of the 89% who wants to bring back the stock and pillory.