Randell Beck School

An expatriate South Dakotan weighs in on the latest flap over "facts" that Argus Leader editor Randell Beck insists on. He notes the classes available at the "Randall Beck School of Poor Blogging and General Stupidity" (it's brutal, yes, but Beck brought this on):

Entry-Level Courses

Required:
Basic Yahoo Spotting - 101
Intermediate Yahoo Spotting - 102
Basic Condescension - 121
Basic Fact Ignoring - 141
Creative Fact Invention - 142
Replacing Logic with Volume - 161
Crushing Dissent - 181

Electives:
Evil Bloggers and Their Minions - 111
Lying for Fun and Profit: The Modern Newspaper - 131
Hurling Effective Invective - 151
Bias Concealment - 171

Intermediate-Level Courses

Required:
Advanced Yahoo Spotting - 201
Advanced Derision - 221
Insulting Your Readers' Intelligence (and Getting Away With It) - 241
Sounding like an Expert on Subjects you Know Nothing About - 261
Proper Use of the Nazi/Fascist Metaphor - 281

Electives:
Uppity Lawyers and Professors: Case Studies in Blogging - 211
Making up Conspiracy Theories to Hide Your Own Conspiracy - 231
Using Fecal References on Your Opponents - 251
Providing Effective Cover for Your Preferred Public Officials - 271

Advanced-Level Courses

Required:
Distinguishing the Yahoo from the Joker - 301
Making Vitriol Your Friend and using it to Your Advantage - 321
Effective Use of Monopoly Power: Crafting the News to Fit Your Agenda - 341
Advanced Nuance: Speaking Clearly out of Both Sides of Your Mouth (Taught by Visiting Teacher John Kerry) - 361
Denying the Existence of Calls for Reform - 381

Electives:
Heroes in the War on Blogs: Beck and Boyd, Kranz and Coleman - 311
Maintaining the Dual Persona, or Keeping the Folks Back Home in the Dark (Taught by Visiting Teacher Tom Daschle) - 331
Name-Calling as a Substitute for Accountability - 351
The Art of Being a Sycophant - 371

Enroll today!

Ouch.

UPDATE: Prestopundit on the Argus Leader: "527's look like a minor problem when set next to the problem of a state with a party-line monopoly newspaper, edited by booomer lefties in mental decline."

UPDATE II: This is more my tone, from Glenn Reynolds' piece today "A Media Meltdown?":

Whoever winds up in the White House next year, the position of these traditional media outlets (or "legacy media" as some call them) continues to decline.

That decline is partly technological in origin. Monopolistic or oligopolistic newspapers and broadcast outlets were the result of technology: economies of scale and scope that rewarded consolidation and led to virtually no competition among newspapers and very little among broadcasters. Now that's changing, as alternative outlets like talk radio, cable television, and, especially, the Internet, have almost completely removed the traditional barriers to entry and allowed competition.

But the loss of those barriers isn't the biggest problem faced by the mainstream media. The biggest problem is that, like most monopolists, they've spent so many years enjoying their position and not worrying about quality that they're left floundering now that competition is exposing their faults.

More:

But the real problem here, to paraphrase a Massachusetts politician who ran for President a few elections back, is not ideology, but competence.

The press's neutrality has been revealed as a fiction. That might not matter if they were still better at what they did than anyone else. After all, what about all the fact-checking, the professionalism, the editors meticulously ensuring fairness and accuracy?

Yeah. What about 'em? It's tempting to point to Jayson Blair, or any of the other media scandals of the past couple of years. (Or, for that matter, to Walter Duranty). But the problem goes even deeper than that. Beyond these major scandals, a combination of laziness, bias, and complacency haunts reporting on all sorts of subjects.

The latest example has to do with the controversy over John Kerry's claims to have been in Cambodia on Christmas Day, 1968. He wasn't, as even his campaign has admitted now. But major media ignored this story for weeks, even as bloggers and others were researching and publishing.