Mark Miller wrote: >[SNIP] > > 2. Too bad (if true) that Eric Alterman could not think of a reply to Michael Bloomberg's question. I could have answered it at length, as could many other media critics, who deal with just that sort of question all the time. In any case, I'm not Eric Alterman, nor is there any single-minded movement out there talking up "the concentration thesis." While that bogey obviously serves Doug's purposes as a polemicist, it represents no extant group. Over on the Marxism list I was accused of being a devotee of the "bourgeois division of intellectual labor" or something like that. I had argued that there were better ways of arguing for limits to human knowledge than for amateurs to drag in the Heisenberg principle from physics. And I do honor specialized knowledge. But "media critics" is a pretty bizarre "grouping," about as trustworthy I would guess as astrologists. The point is that (contra McLuhan) it is intellectually vapid to talk about "media" as a subject abstractable from basic social relations under given historical conditions. The media simply do not exist as an independent "object of study," nor do those who might use the term "media critic" for themselves --Upton Sinclair, FAIR, Alexander Cockburn -- engage in such pretentiousness. Nor did that lovely periodical, *The Lies of the Times*, which was worth half a dozen *Nation*s. They all just trudge (or trudged along) saying, "This is what happened," "This is what such and such a newspaper or TV show said (or didn't say) happened." It's called good journalism, all too missing from the *Nation* lately. Carrol
