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The utter failure of American commercial media. Why are blogs and C-Span and noncommercial media so important? Because they show politics unmediated, without the happy talk hairdos devoid of any ideas that didn't come hot off the fax machine. The expensive anchors add nothing to the process and offer not news but rather a distraction from it. And the supposedly clueless unsophisticated masses recognize what's happening because the ratings bear this out:

Over at PBS, some 7.7 million viewers tuned in during its Tuesday night coverage, a greater audience than the combined 6 million viewers watching CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, according to Nielsen stats.

The "conventional wisdom" churned out daily by the so-called mainstream cable news media titans turns out to be peripheral. When the audiences of CNN, Fox News and MSNBC combined can't approach the audience drawn to PBS's broadcast of an unmediated political convention, the nature of the cable networks' position as the radical fringe of ultramediated American discourse becomes obvious.

An aside. Why I blog: Because I don't give a flying fuck about Kobe Bryant or Michael Jackson or Scott Peterson or whoever the perp du jour is. This is an attempt to retain a teacup of sanity against the tidal wave of dross known as the American media universe.

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