NP: Diver playlist

I guess I shouldn't expect much from a lame-duck Crossfire, but this is just depressing. Not even because Begala and Novak gave Armstrong Williams such a free pass when he's giving Novak a run for his money as a journalistic douchebag, but because this is so emblematic of the sorry state of modern news. You don't dare piss off your party and you don't dare piss off the clique to which you belong.

The sheer insularity of it is staggering, and it's going to be tough to break that stranglehold. I guess blogs may help, but they still don't have the audience to break even the relatively small monolith of a cable news network. Of course, I'm assuming that an arts column in the New York Times won't amount to much, either, as I suspect there's also a certain territorialism between print and broadcast before you even get to conflicting media biases.

This is exactly why young people watch Jon Stewart for their news, pretty much in a nutshell.