A great dissection of supposed middle brow journalism in contemporary American discourse, particularly the NYT, if only for the scathing summation that "What you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised."

Foucault? In my mind he's a conservative. His early books (Discipline and Punish and Birth of the Clinic) are brilliant and cover the ground that anarchists like Murray Bookchin do, debunking them all the way. Clinic also explains why health care is never going to seem affordable because, even if Bill Gates could afford CABG surgery and you couldn't, he's got to get millions of people to get the surgery so that the techniques are developed enough that the survival odds are good.

> do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two “sides,” or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it.

This is a great summary of so many reporting failures of recent time.

Everything must have two sides and they're going to report both sides as if they were exactly equal credibility.