Past performance is no guarantee of future results:
Sam Tanenhaus has now reprised the old arguments about conservatism and tried to bring them up to date in his newly published jeremiad, The Death of Conservatism. Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of a justly acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, argues that the conservative movement collapsed under the presidency of George W. Bush, and that Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 marked the beginning of a new liberal era in American politics.
— “Is Conservatism Dead?”, James Piereson, September 1st, 2009, the New Criterion.
In Monday’s New York Times, reporter Amy Chozick explored how the James Rosen leak probe has turned the media debate upside down, with “Conservatives as Defenders of the Media.”
“The press — often the target of allegations of liberal bias by conservative media — has found an unlikely ally in right-leaning radio and television hosts who have taken to defending the First Amendment with a fire-and-brimstone zeal,” she wrote.
Chozick started with the zeal of Glenn Beck, and later turned to Michael Harrison of Talkers Magazine – who made what may be the obvious point: freedom of speech is a constant theme at annual talk-radio conventions. Our former MRC colleague Seton Motley put it just right: ”I would argue conservatives are the ones that routinely defend all the amendments in the Constitution, the First, the Second, the Fourth. …”
— “New York Times Quizzically Ponders ‘Conservatives as Defenders of the Media,'” Tim Graham, Newsbusters, today.
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