For What It's Worth . . .

I don't have a television or a radio, and, so disheartened am I by developments in our culture of late, that in the last year I haven't bothered to turn on a television even when I'm on the road and stuck in a motel.

But before that I occasionally turned on the TV in my motel room -- switching back and forth, as was my habit, between the cable news outlets, hoping against hope to find some reasonably unbiased reporting. On those rare dips into the turgid waters of the mainstream media, I think I may have caught a glimpse or two of Glenn Beck. He struck me as a young man who needs a rest, who is bordering on clinical hysteria, just as I suspect his MSNBC counterpart, Keith Olberman, is.

As my post about the Van Jones fiasco may have suggested, I got my information about that sordid affair from what have proven to be reliable sources among the new media: NewsBusters for instance (which, by the way, has a story today that bears reading, here), and Sunlit Uplands, Creative Minority Report, City Journal, and others.

Only belatedly did I learn that most people were made aware of the Jones controversy by Glenn Beck's hammering away at it. Well, if that's what it took, I'm glad he did, but that doesn't mean that I find his pugnacity any more appealing than Olberman's.

The above mentioned blogsites are culturally conservative, which is one reason I find them interesting, but their cultural and social conservatism, while occasionally expressed vigorously, as is mine at times, is rooted in something far more substantive than party politics.

As I say, for what it's worth.