THE BUBBLE WHERE EVERYBODY LOVES EVERYBODY:

Some Industries Deserve Bankruptcy: 'Newsweek' and Katie and Maureen--oh my! (Andrew Ferguson, 06/01/2009, Weekly Standard)

It was that kind of week: While flipping the pages of the new Newsweek, it began to occur to everybody that, hey, this is a pretty stupid idea for a magazine. Are there really 1.5 million magazine readers--the number of subscribers Jon has promised advertisers--who want a liberal opinion magazine written by liberals who don't want to admit they're liberals? Last week everybody looked at one another and pondered a world without Newsweek.

Monday wasn't even over yet before everybody found out that Maureen Dowd, who as everyone knows writes a column for the New York Times, had lifted a paragraph from a popular blog and put it into her column and passed it off as her own work. Everybody loves Maureen. She's everybody's favorite. More important, everybody wants to be Maureen's favorite. So everybody pretended this didn't happen. Instead everybody believed Maureen when she said she'd been "talking to a friend of mine" who made a point in a "cogent--and I assumed spontaneous--way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column." That's why it was woven word for word in her copy.

Her explanation was implausible in every particular, compounding her original offense. Normally everybody loves it when this happens, because everybody gets to say to one another, "In Washington the cover up is often worse than the crime!" But this was Maureen. The unthinkable began to emerge as the implausibility sunk in. Everybody's favorite was not only lazy and unimaginative but dishonest too--a bit of a fraud. Just in time the "media critic" for the Washington Post stepped in to deliver summary judgment. Maureen, he announced, had made an "inadvertent mistake." Relieved, everybody went back to loving Maureen and wanting to be loved by her. [...]

Then Helen Thomas was hoisted to the podium to present her award to Katie [Couric]. Everybody admires Helen, though nobody can tell you why. Helen mentioned the Palin interview too. She said Katie's skewering of Palin had ensured that John McCain would lose the election to Barack Obama. You know how everybody feels about Barack Obama--he's the guy the world bends itself to.

"Katie had the right stuff to do that game-changing interview," Helen said. "After that, the ballgame was over."

Helen gave a dramatic pause, then said: "She saved the country."

Helen got a standing ovation, from everybody.