HD in his fine article mentioned Ryan Holiday, writer of Trust Me, I’m Lying.

One thing in that book I truly enjoyed was Holiday’s sobbing over The Good Old Days.

Holiday is about 40, so it is especially funny to me to see his shedding tears over how the Web has ended the times when Honest Men controlled the news!

Holiday says that the web has ruined the news, which used to be provided with total honesty and neutrality by the New York Times, 60s news monopoly by PBS, by the Washington Post, and above all by CBS, NBC, and ABC.

As the Devil sings in the “Damn Yankees!”: “Ah, Those Were the Good Old Days!”

When Holiday bemoans the death of the old news monopoly, he is deadly serious. He sounds for all the world like a speaker at the Daughters of the American Revolution talking about how George Washington could never tell a lie.

Holiday starts his book by announcing that his hero is Jon Leibowitz, aka, Jon Stewart.

This is pretty typical of Holiday’s world view: His idea of a truth teller is someone who doesn’t even give his real name.

Actually, I lived and worked through Holiday’s Time of Truth. That experience caused me to ask, first of all:

“Why is this information produced?”

Holiday bemoans these Latter Days when absolutely nobody claims to produce information because it is true.

But there is not a single thing that has CHANGED from Holiday’s New York communications monopoly to the present web culture. On Wikipedia, you can see which side wrote the definitions there, but, unless you were a truly wonked-out Believer in Political Correctness, you could tell what the point of view was of anybody who wrote for the Monopoly Media.

In fact, you couldn’t get a writing job, God knows you couldn’t get a high-level political job, if from the first paragraph what the writer’s political point of view was could not be known.

Holiday is bent out of shape by the web culture because he was a babe in the woods before.