Red State Cavalry

To The Rescue!

A brief history of journalism...

In less than 100 years we have gone from this:

Isaac Babel
Edited by Nathalie Babel and translated by Peter Constantine
Introduction by Michael Dirda
Red Cavalry

"Amazing not only as literature but as biography."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times

One of the great masterpieces of Russian literature, the Red Cavalry cycle retains today the shocking freshness that made Babel's reputation when the stories were first published in the 1920s.

Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia.
...

To this (h/t Wonkette):

Joe The Plumber To Do Some New Dumb Stunt In War Zone

Ha ha, the entire journalism/media/publishing industry is collapsing, there are no jobs, more and more of America’s best writers and reporters are permanently unemployed, and there’s not any reason for this typhoon of fiery “creative destruction” to roll back, ever, meaning it’s really just “destruction,” since the American economy does not “create” so much as it does “restructure, hide, and disguise short-term corporate debt.”

Where were we going with this again? Oh yeah, Joe the Plumber got a reporter job with Pajamas Media to go cover Israel and the Muslims’ war on a small, shitty landstrip thousands of miles away. Suck on that, you mid-major American newspapers that’ve been forced to shut down your foreign bureaus!
...

In under a century we have gone from celebrating the hard-working, ink-stained wretches who comfort the afflicted...

...to the shake-n-bake celebrity Monkey Wrenches of Freedom who cosset the affluent.

If I could stop crying for a minute I'm sure I'd find this screamingly funny.