Pravda lives!

Speaking of revenge fantasies, here's one that's a little more subtle, but ends up laugh-out-loud ridiculous, and obvious, in its anti-Fox News aim. At the tail end of 4706 words of hand-wringing guilt over his partial admiration of FNC's Bill O'Reilly, the New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann whips out the pixie dust and sprinkles it on thick:

When O’Reilly’s day has passed, though, he certainly will have left a lasting stamp on cable news, which is increasingly a medium of outsize, super-opinionated franchise personalities. It is hard to remember, without taking a minute to think about it, who delivers the morning and evening news on the cable networks, or who the main reporters are. Cable is not a medium for providing information, and it is not going to become one anytime soon...

Pardon me for a second while I retrieve my eyeballs from the roof of my brain--they rolled up so high into my head they got stuck there. Ah, that's better. Do you see what Lemann is doing? It's pure Orwell: War is peace, freedom is slavery. Cable news--which, to the horror of old-school libs like The New Yorker, is now synonymous with Fox News--is such a juggernaut, such an anxiety-inducing departure from the good old days of the We Know Best network news/liberal MSM elite cabal, that the only way to address it is to flat deny its existence. Reading Lemann's conclusion is like reading an iron curtain-era back issue of Pravda. The difference, though, is that the New Yorker can only fantasize about having every Fox News viewer shot.

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