[lbo-talk] American journalism: comfort the comfortable, afflict the afflicted

[andie nachgeborenen]

> Last week, Newsweek emptied its pockets of all the
> John Kerry dirt 
> that had settled there during the campaign and lain
> dormant until the 
> votes were counted. It turns out that the
> Kerry-Edwards crowd was 
> totally incompetent and ran a "clumsy and unwieldy"
> campaign.

I'll accept that based on my experience in Ohio.

 > 
> Why do we do this? In a superb new book due out
> soon, Born Losers: A 
> History of Failure in America, historian Scott A.
> Sandage of Carnegie 
> Mellon University traces modern loserdom back to its
> 19th-century 
> origins. In the early 1840s, a New Yorker named
> William Tappan 
> started the Mercantile Agency, a new kind of company
> that gathered 
> information about businessmen all around America --
> their successes 
> and failures, their characters, sometimes even their
> family lives. In 
> a country of millions, the agency boasted it could
> find almost anyone 
> and rate them in seven days, using a national
> network of paid 
> informants that eventually numbered in the thousands
> and at one point 
> included the young Abraham Lincoln. It sold the
> intelligence to 
> customers who were trying to decide whether to hire
> an individual, 
> make them a loan, etc.

Sounds like ETS . . . . 

		
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