I Could Have Laughed to Death

Matt Taibbi's take on elite opinion idiot Thomas Friedman is that funny. The left has generally been turning its attention from the Bush administration to incompetents in the Democratic coalition. Friedman is a daily target for bloggers like Glenn Greenwald while John Kerry and Joe Biden have been taking some hard hits from the Daily Show.

Because the Obama administration has not yet taken shape, the media field surrounding the Obama administration is also indeterminate. No one knows how the sub-fields of the right-wing media, mainstream media, and the left media are going to function or how much weight each of these fields is going to have over the next eight years (making the big assumption that Obama is going to win re-election).

Right now however, I think it is safe to say that the emerging left-wing media is the dynamic element in the contemporary media landscape. Television personalities like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Rachel Maddow, blogs like The Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Digby, and Glenn Greenwald, and op-ed columnists like Paul Krugman have supplanted organs like The New Republic as opinion-makers on the left.

However, the mainstream media and conservative media have become such big question marks that it's impossible to get a read on the field as a whole. To what extent will the mainstream media be cheerleaders for President Obama and his administration? If they decide to focus on celebratizing Obama and his family, cheerleading might be their main function? But liberal bloggers also point out that elements of the media are seeking to coalesce around right of center opinion concerning the economic stimulus package, Bush administration war crimes, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Perhaps the mainstream media will become the chief public source of right-of-center questioning of the Obama administration.

But that's far from being written into stone.

It's difficult to get a read on the conservative media as well. Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox, and the elements in the conservative media that drive opinion among conservative activists have been unreserved in their opposition toward Obama. But elite media figures like William Kristol, George Will, and David Brooks don't like being limited to "preaching to the choir" and are wary of popular conservative constituencies like religious conservatives and hard-core small government types. Given certain conditions, it's easy all of these figures supporting Obama over their erstwhile conservative constituencies.

But, people like Matt Taibbi are the media wild-card. If large audiences of informed readers start laughing themselves to death over Tom Friedman columns, the media landscape is going to start tilting toward the left.