Napoleon in Rags and the Language That He Used

Imagine a journalistic source that became very financially profitable very quickly, by blending news and opinion, and aiming both its tone and its coverage towards a very specific niche of the American public that was long despised by the mainstream media when it wasn’t outright ignored entirely.

Of course, you knew who I was talking about all along right?

Rolling Stone magazine. Who did you think I was talking about?

Oh right. And at the Daily Caller, Mark Judge has a great take on why Rolling Stone blows a gasket whenever it covers Fox News:

Still, [the] paranoia of [Rolling Stone’s Tom Dickinson] about Fox is so extreme that it has elicited mild criticism on the left. Jack Shafer, Slate’s liberal press critic, shrugged off Dickinson’s piece. He notes that Hillary Clinton was feeding opposition research about John Edwards and Barack Obama to Fox. He also points out that Fox’s audience is still relatively small — not microscopic, like MSNBC’s audience, but smaller than the old networks’ audiences. Then Shafer offers this sentence: “I’ve never understood why Fox News’ shenanigans rattle liberals so.”

OK, Jack, since you have no curiosity about that, let me give it a shot. If you read the histories of journalists over the past 40 years or so, certain patterns emerge. Most of them — like the folks at Slate — are liberal and got into the business to “change the world.” Further, most of them are losers who did not play sports and could not get dates in high school and college. When Fox came along, with its chutzpah in allowing conservatives an actual voice, its bombshell anchors, its joyful ridicule of the self-righteous left, its outright sense of fun — well, this was just too much. Liberal journalists — now there’s a redundancy — didn’t just see their empire collapsing. They saw the cheerleaders who ignored them. They saw the conservative jock they hated and his country-club parents. They saw these people, these ogres, moving into their turf. And they went absolutely batshit.

And they continue to do so. Liberals can’t just ignore Fox; they find it too fascinating. They are like the kids in high school who absolutely despise the pretty, popular girl, then spend hours on the phone every night talking about her. At the core of it is jealousy, as well as the rage, paranoia and resentment that Tom Dickinson attributes to Fox. I mean, journalists were going to help the left change the world. And you can’t do that by giving dissenters a voice.

But that’s the problem with wanting to change the world — sometimes it changes all by itself, without your help. And you find yourself working for a magazine that once considered itself “countercultural,” now comfortably part of the bourgeois, and hating the real counterculture. To coin a phrase, how does it feel?