For news coverage, I’ve now converted almost exclusively to RT (on whose website my Paleolibertarian Column features). I recommend that thinking readers do the same. A few days with RT and you will begin to understand just how impoverished American media are (and how valid this writer’s media critique has been over the years); the degree to which broadcasters and journalists have degraded journalism and contributed immeasurably to the deep stupidity, gargantuan arrogance, and short attention spans of their viewers.

Americans are “a silly people in serious times” (Pat Buchanan’s words). Reason, intellectual honesty and curiosity, and standards of decency have been expunged from the national dialogue.

There isn’t a news story that isn’t biased, contaminated with every conceivable error in thinking, from pop psychology, to addiction and self-esteem fallacies, to obsessive, interminable negrophilia.

If you can no longer stomach the bombast in American broadcast media, the vanity panels, the egos in the anchor’s chair who’ve tailored debate and chosen interlocutors to fit their own limitations; if you’ve had it with Anderson Cooper-type journo-activism, the ubiquitous dog and cat stories, the constant stream of feel-good, feminized, soft news vignettes that festoon news and commentary; if you can stand not a moment more of the America über alles, navel-gazing, chauvinistic, delusions of grandeur and of empire promulgated by the self-important American media—I recommend RT.

Yes, there is leftist, even statist, programing at RT, but it doesn’t permeate every news segment like at CNN, where today, White House correspondent Jessica Yelling delivered a how-to for Obama on countering bad press about alternative energy. On RT you’ll find interesting segments complied by critical thinkers who pursue the kind of unorthodox angles I’ve pursued in my columns over the years, but which are absent from the American channels. “Exporting Revolution,” for example, with BAB A List writer Nebojsa Malic. (Related topic: “LaHood Is Still In The Egyptian Hood”)

This morning, as the Idiocracy at MSNBC, FoxNews and CNN counted down to the endorsement of Mitt Romney by the unthinking, crass, and Synophobic Donald Trump, RT’s Capital Account was tracking Ben Bernanke’s defense of “the Federal Reserve’s financial repression of savers on Capitol Hill.” Their words. Jim Rogers was on fire.

Sadly, I no longer watch the loud bluster on Freedom Watch, unless Lew Rockwell, always calms and Rothbardian, graces the show. The volume level, the Paul worship (such aggressive allegiance to any politician creeps me out), and the dueling perspectives political panels (featuring horrible, boring truth deniers like Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne) are pure torture.

Besides, when an anchor introduces his regulars (and boy are they day-in, and day-out fixtures) as “my good friend (Kirstin Powers),” or as “friend of the show,” it smacks of buddy-buddy influence peddling, not of an honest pursuit of ideas. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the work done on Freedom Watch to popularize constitutional principles among the masses, but it has become more like the other cable personality centered ego-driven shoutfests. And, of course, the regular robots from Reason Magazine, representing “Libertarianism Lite,” are tiresome.

Off to catch up on world events …

UPDATE I: Need I say more? Right now, as mainstream American media pretend jobs have materialized out of thin air, you can hear Jeffrey Tucker on RT’s Capital Account, talking about ending the Fed.

UPDATE II: Ann Coulter to Mitt Romeny at a fundraiser, “You owe me and you better be as right-wing a president as I’m telling everybody you’re going to be.’” Schmooze.

But another example of the narrow coterie that makes up the American media elite. Mind you, if the Judge welcomed “My buddy Ann Coulter, good friend of the show,” we’d at least have a few laughs. She’s always sharp and adds information, unlike the banal, boring, never-said-an-original-thing-in-their-lives Colmes and Powers.

UPDATE III: (Feb. 4): Do not distort my words, John D (in Comments). The style issue is minor. In your adulation, you’ve chosen here to do me a disservice by ignoring the repeated substantive comments made over these pixelated pages about the bent of “Freedom Watch.” In particular: 1) The sinecured Left-libertarian bores who’ve take up residence on the show, covered in “Libertarianism Lite.” Reason does not represent American libertarianism (Old Right), nor does it resonate with most Americans. American libertarianism is rightist.

2) As in all the cloistered and closed American programing—and contrary to RT’s which really welcomes many voices, and not only those of pundits and presstitutes who huddle close to Power—the habit on Freedom Watch is to shut out and expunge from the debate the unkosher faction, which is also, again, the libertarianism that most resonates with the American Right at large: paleolibertarianism.

3) In “Fox News And Its Truth Deniers,” I offered a substantive argument against the positively postmodernist “dueling perspectives political panel” perfected on the show. You, John, chose to ignore my case against the “parallel universe” created and paraded as truth, represented by the odious regulars listed: Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, Kirstin Powers, etc. “The above Fox News fixtures,” I argued, “no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.”

“By presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.” This Freedom Watch achieves handily.

Alas, in your blind adulation, John, you have chosen to cast substantive critique as a complaint about style (the latter—the delivery—being bloody horrible). What a shame.

CONTINUED IN THE POST, “More Reasons to Secede from the Pundit Pantheons of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.”