Mark Steyn's RX for Jeff Bezos Now That He Owns The Washington Post

Well deserved accolades from the great Steyn, Kate!

MS: Yeah, and you know, again, you’ve got to be careful what happens there. I mean, I saw, there’s a blogger in Saskatchewan of all places who I love to read called Kate McMillan. And she had a one-line comment on Obama cancelling his meeting with Vladimir Putin this week. She just put in one line. He’s also sending back the bust of Lenin.

HH: (laughing)

MS: Which I thought was a great line. Now Kate McMillan is just sitting there in the middle of Saskatchewan doing this for free, and it’s actually better…

HH: That’s very good...

Fantastic plug, but would've been better had he dropped the blog's name!

Yes, I wonder also - why did MS fail to say smalldeadanimals? Whats wrong?

I'm betting in the audio clip Steyn pronounces Saskatchewan wrong. All foreigners do.

Nice, well deserved compliment for Kate. Congratulations.

Journalism is all about entertainment and nothing about information. I have probably bought 10 newspapers in the last 10 years, usually in response to a headline I notice.

Are journalists severely underpaid? I mean, where does the stupid come from? I was watching all the whiners on CTV Edmonton doing their whining routine about the 25th anniversary of the Gretzky trade. They crapped on Peter Pocklington who was lucky to unload Gretzky for anything considering he was an unrestricted free agent who, despite the crocodile tears had to buy into the deal, because he was AN UNRESTRICTED FREE AGENT.

Then one idiot journalist asked what would have happened if Edmonton had kept Gretzky to which the other idiot journalist replied that they probably would have won one more Cup which is exactly what the did without Gretzky. The formula for success is to do real old-fashioned journalism by working hard and not insulting the audience.

The most read newspaper online in the United States is the Daily Mail, which is a Fleet Street newspaper, and which is doing so well in the United States that it has in effect a sort of disguised American homepage full of stories about American celebrities and what not. And it goes, and I think it gets to the heart of the problem, that American journalism, the horrible guild mentality has actually destroyed the art of American newspapering.

OUCH that one must cut to the bone. Just guessing here, but I can't see many Americans going out of their way to read a British paper unless there's good reason.

An athiest creating and editing a "miraculous" blog, eh?

It's a nice thought, but Hewitt's list suffers from the pre-supposition that the job of mainstream journalists is to report the truth and not what our masters either want the rabble to think or what our masters desperately want to hear, and that the mainstream media is reformable, when the hard fact is that in the days of the Internet it's hardly worth the trouble of reforming.

Jeff Bezos isn't going to hire someone to write for the Washington Post that what the world needs is a good old-fashioned famine to give mankind a refresher course in priorities. Formerly spoiled rich housewives whose poverty and hunger reduces them to killing their own canine and feline "children" for meat probably won't have much money left over to buy the latest dirty novel for their Kindle.

My list for Bezos is much shorter (though I fear just as fanciful).

1. Shut down the Post, print and online. Replace it with nothing.

2. Liquidate the Post's assets, and donate the net proceeds, if any, to the Bible society of his choice. If the Post's former correspondents and readers are genuinely interested in understanding the world, the best places for them to start are the Law, the Prophets and the Gospels.

3. Release all e-mails on the Post's computer servers, incoming and outgoing, before selling the computers for scrap. We all know what the release of e-mails did to expose the global warming conspiracy. The debt the plain people of America will owe Bezos for the chance to see what their moral and intellectual superiors are really about will be worth far more than $250 million.

Steyn was born in Toronto. He's a foreigner in Saskatchewan.

Mark Steyn correctly points to the quality of (what passes for) journalism in newsprint, itself a waning media. Any article can be virtually devoid of facts if opinion can plump it up. What I notice is the "in-house" purchase of this paper and what must be the mistaken belief that the new owner can resurrect the Post.

Good luck with that.

LC Bennett - Have you read much Steyn? You compare him to Gnatieff?

"The most read newspaper online in the United States is the Daily Mail....". Let's see, ah, yeh. Very popular. Very, ah, well known here in the U.S. And, and, ah, I think that SOMEONE IS BLOWING A LOT OF HOT AIR. Ah, yeh. I did enjoy the video however.

Woo Hoo Kate,that was quite the pat on the back and deservedly so.

I like Slaters suggestion.

Kate is our very own 'mahatma of the mot juste' but readers of this blog have known that for years.