Last night, I actually made the mistake of thinking the Village MSM was getting better.  What fooled me was that they are asking tougher questions of Obama than they ever asked Junior. Turns out, I missed the point badly.  Reading the transcript, I saw what I'd missed listening with half an ear, while I worked on something else.  The "tougher" questions are just them showing how fully a part of the now-extinct age of Republican policy dominance they became.  The Villagers are just naturally going to be more hostile with a Democrat because he's doing things wrong by their lights.  The content itself is still just as banal as ever it was under Bush. 

Now, having read the transcript, I'm wondering if it will ever occur to any of the major news outlets that "the weakening power of the big news orgs" is directly attributable to the ever-increasing banality of their content.  They really remind me of restaurants that lose business by cutting quality and then react to the reduced traffic by cutting quality some more, reducing portions and raising prices. 

Zogby's pathetic outliers not withstanding, Obama is popular, even with people who voted against him, because he talks to people like they're adults.  You just get a sense that he has "integrity" in the literal sense, i.e. that his public and private faces are integral, basically the same.  This just baffles and infuriates the Villagers.  It frustrates them to no end because the one thing thought they really shared with the politicians is having utterly separate and distinct public and private personas that routinely say, and indicate they think, utterly different things. 

Here they are performing the ritual correctly, in the time-honored (i.e. twenty year old) fashion.  They put on their false faces, appear at the appointed time and place and then dutifully ask President's false face the expected questions necessary to elicit the expected false face answers.  And, instead, he goes and blurts our the "real" answers right there in front of everyone, the answers that they think they only their private faces should get from the politician's private face, off the record, on deep background, and preferably while sipping free drinks and eating free hors d'ouvres as some socialite's townhouse. It simply isn't how things are done.  It's not cricket.  It is absolutely infuriating.   Where are the Broder-soothing platitudes?  And where are the leaks?  Why is the flow of authorized leaks telling us what we're really supposed to be telling the peons is "really" going on so constricted?  And why won't he come to our club for an evening of off-the-record schmoozing and entertain us with insidery jokes? 

It must be a trick, and we don't like it. 

And, you know, maybe it really is a trick.  Maybe Obama has brilliantly fashioned a fiendishly clever false face for the public that perfectly reflects the audience's beliefs about what his private face must be like and, in fact, he's totally different in private.  And maybe he's succeeded in hiding that real private face from the press, or at least in charming the press into hding it from themselves, such that they never give us any hint that there are differences between public and private persona.  After all, it can be done.  John McCain did it for years.  Indeed, at some level I suspect that it really is true because I don't know how anyone could truly "be themselves" with the Villagers. 

Regardless, however, the effect of what he does at these things is to crystalize the public's growing disdain for the ever-growing banality of the "content" spewed out by Big Media.  It causes people watching these things to roll their eyes and .say "Jesus, what a bunch of assclowns!  Why won't you just ask an intelligent question about something that matters to me instead of either trying to force him to reduce complex issues to a facile anecdote or simplistic platitude or, worse, playing your silly Beltway Tim Russert 'gotcha' game?  He is talking to me like an adult.  Why can't you guys do that too?"

I have no data other than anecdotes, but I really think that that's a widespread, growing, view.  I think people started feeling that way about the MSM's treatement of Dubya and that the mirror Obama holds up to their ass-clownery has only accelerated the trend and, so, demand for the product drops. 

And, because the people running things are no longer even capable of distinguishing between entertainment and journalism, Big Media continues to draw the wrong conclusions and go in the exact opposite direction necessary to draw the customers back.  First, they replaced the head chefs who started the restaurants with MBAs who replaced meat and vegatables with empty carbs and processed meat treats, and when people got bored with that, they added lots of sugar.  Now that people are finally getting sick of sugar and empty calories, their response is to cut costs by replacing the sugar with high fructose corn sweetner. 

Obama is showing them a potential path back from the brink of financial ruin.  Act like adults and treat the audience like adults.  Acknowledge and embrace complexity.  Give it a try, MSM.  It may require replacing the asshats with real journalists, if you can find some, somewhere, but people may be ready for it, for a while at least, for a while.  And, hell, what do you have to lose?