Where's The Street-Wise Hercules To Fight The Rising Odds?

Jonah Goldberg writes that, like Bonnie Tyler, the media are holding out for a hero–and they found not just one brave warrior, but two of them!

In an age when Fox News is a ratings juggernaut and Katie Couric is ratings roadkill, it seems almost antique to talk about liberal media bias. But it’s still out there, my friends. Just look at the hilarious press release masquerading as a news story in Time magazine. With a picture of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg looking like henchmen from Murder Inc., Time proclaims these politicians “The New Action Heroes.” And why are the Munchkin Mayor and the glandular Governator so heroic? Because they’re taking care of business in a flash, as Elvis used to say (and probably still does on that Pacific island where he lives with Bruce Lee). Time’s Michael Grunwald comes close to sounding like a teenage girl talking about Justin Timberlake. Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger are doing “big things,” he tells us. “Specifically, they’re doing big things that Washington has failed to do.” Unlike politicians in the nation’s capital, where “partisanship-on-crack has made compromise almost impossible,” Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg have “got better things to do than bicker and posture.”

And what are these better things? Well, they’re both fighting global warming, natch. And Arnold’s fighting for embryo-destroying stem cell research while Bloomberg, Grunwald gushes, has implemented “America’s most draconian smoking ban and the first big-city trans-fat ban.”

Heroes indeed!

Read the whole thing, which is a great explanation of the template by which the legacy media frames virtually all of its government-related stories:

The false advertising here is the never-ending story of elite journalism’s bias toward “heroes” who expand government (which is why FDR remains the greatest hero in American history to so many Washington scribes).

Meanwhile, as Edward Glaeser writes in the New York Sun, “Amity Shlaes’s fascinating new history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man (HarperCollins, 480 pages, $26.95), challenges this conventional wisdom“. It will be interesting to see if her book makes any dent in this sclerotic paradigm, now in its seventh decade and ripe for updating.

Update: I don’t think that Harry