NP: Mike Keneally Band, Guitar Therapy Live

I'm seeing lots of online love for my freshman year college roommate's recent Washington Post article about how the health care "debate" is both similar and very different from past political conflagrations in our great democracy. When "the esteemed Rick Pearlstein" points to Walter Cronkite as one of the gatekeepers who left the fringe outside the discussion back in the day, though, I think he's got the right target but in the wrong way.

Steven Benen gets a bit closer with a letter from Bruce Bartlett and some discussion of Fox News, but I don't see Fox News as the root cause as much as it's one of the more prominent symptoms. The underlying factor, to me, seems to be the advent of cable television, talk radio, and the splintering of the mainstream into countless niches. Bartlett touches on it but then backs off.

What this massive proliferation of channels has done is to allow the fringes and the looneys to be marketed to explicitly. Rupert Murdoch was really just exploiting a really big niche. When there were only three networks, that simply couldn't happen, and I think Cronkite's personality was just one of the contributing factors. Once the game because about viewer penetration within your chosen niche, that ushered in all these other changes that Perlstein, Benen and Bartlett are talking about.