We’ve been talking about that “fractured media landscape” for a few decades now. But the fractures seem to be getting deeper. The news environment in 2004 was not very much like what it was in the heyday for the Big Three networks, when the national news conversation was dominated by (that seething crackpot) Walter Cronkite, but Dan Rather was still a big enough cultural presence at that time that his fraudulent report on George W. Bush’s military service — a pre-election hit piece — became a momentary national obsession. That episode was, among other things, the launchpad of modern right-wing Internet journalism as we know it…

Top-shelf Fox News hosts and their MSNBC counterparts are all multimillionaire employees of multinational media conglomerates, they typically work one block away from each other at their respective studios in Manhattan, they live in the same neighborhoods if not in the same buildings, their children go to the same schools, etc. — and they have a lot more in common with one another than either has in common with the shmucks who compose their audiences, in the same way two competing dairymen have more in common with one another than either has in common with the herds of cows they milk. The chief of staff for a Democratic senator has more in common with the chief of staff of a Republican senator than either has in common with most of the people who elect those senators. Etc.

I can’t help thinking that there is a lost political opportunity in all of this. I recently had a conversation with an elected official who is a frequent target of cable-news and talk-radio ire, and that media attention was pretty low on his list of things to worry about — he rarely if ever hears anything about that kind of stuff from any of the people who elect him. Apparently, nobody back home cares as much about Tucker Carlson as SNL does. And that is to be expected.