Thomas Friedman is the perfect example of a modern courtier: you will never find his lips too far from the cock of established power. He is always eager to tell you why his support for the existing order of authorities and hierarchy is bold and courageous, eager to congratulate himself for his daring and revolutionary thoughts that are in fact the most tedious kind of Beltway ass-kissing, and eager to demonstrate that he is a creative genius by demonstrating a talent for cheap analogies and overwrought metaphor to rival literary pimple Dan Brown.

Fortunately Brian Mayer did a little mad-libbing and created the Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator. This is a bit of a relief, although I’m still tempted to cadge some Lexis-Nexis time from a friend, download Friedman’s corpus, and apply some proper Markov-chain fun. The thing is that the ease of creating artificial Friedman demonstrates how shallow and meaningless the authentic Friedman is: rather tragic, really. But not enough so to excuse that he’s a buffoon who apologizes for monsters. My favorite cheap shot at Friedman is Jon Schwarz’s: “he suffers from the affliction [of] a large, furry parasite that has attached itself to his upper lip and sucked his brain out through his nose,” although Monsieur IOZ calls him “the Milton of infelicity” and “a guy who’d go out to the desert to eat peyote and have a vision of the inside of Best Buy,” both of which are also corkers.

My problems with Friedman are a microcosm of my problems with the mainstream US media: they are good at explaining the major arguments going on within the American aristocracy, and that’s about it. They are certainly not anything like defenders of truth, critics of power, or any other piece of their inflated self-image: they are corporations that exist to make money, and their business model is selling readers/viewers/listeners to advertisers. As Schwarz puts it, “there is no Santa Claus.” Their self-interest is only tangentially related to having a healthy community, and much more strongly coupled to pleasing existing power structures. This is part of why I am not particularly sad over the idea that the Internet is going to kill newspapers: newspapers produce as little journalism as they can get away with, and in their role as propaganda outlets almost negate that which they do produce. TV and radio “news” are even worse.

The bright side is that microbroadcasts like this blog are available to more and more people—unfortunately, that’s not evenly distributed and has its own problems. I’ll still take it over centralized and tamed news organizations any day.