February 24, 2005
"Whether charlatanry is an improvement on humbug"
I'm massively enjoying my new Atlantic subscription, and here's another excellent bit of writing. It's an analysis of The Fourth Network: How Fox Broke the Rules and Reinvented Television, and winds up being a pretty insightful commentary on Fox itself. The essayist obviously watches way too much TV, but the one upshot of that is that he seems to be able to intelligently synthesize television with the rest of the culture. He doesn't actually like Fox, but he views the trifecta of CBS/ABC/NBC as being so institutionally petrified that the smarmy delusion of cultural unity that they peddle had become "artifice long before it stopped being tenable," hence the titular quote.
Again, sorry if that link doesn't work. Nothing I can do about it.
