"As a group, the MSM are astoundingly un-self-aware and un-self-critical."

At Ace of Spades, the wonderful writer Oregon Muse tells us that Don Surber has a new book out.

As a group, the MSM are astoundingly un-self-aware and un-self-critical. They spend so much time time patting each other on the back and handing out awards to themselves that they have no idea how they appear to those of us to whom they're trying to sell their product. The difference between who they think they are, and who they actually are, is comically large. Any other profession, when it becomes apparent that something is broken, the members of that profession get together and try to: 1. fix it and 2. take steps to keep it from getting broken again. I know the military does this a lot, especially when they lose a battle. They do extensive analyses of what failed, what went wrong, how it could be improved, and how to avoid getting beat next time.

Now, you'd think that in the face of their massive failures to get the 2016 election right, the MSM would've done something like that. You'd think they would have entered a period of self-reflection, held conferences, consulted with independent experts, etc., in order to understand and correct their mistakes and improve their product. And actually, I did see what I thought was going to be the beginning of this process. In the first week or two after the election, there did appear a sprinkling of "well, we sure screwed the pooch there, didn't we?" articles wherein some in the media tried to confront the endemic problems in their profession (for example, here's one).

But there it stopped. And they doubled down, and then tripled down, on stupid, and they've been cranking out the stupid ever since. It was as if the MSM all looked at each other and said "no, it really isn't our fault after all." They're like a bunch of drunks who sobered up just long enough to realize they've got a serious drinking problem, but realized how hard it would be to actually give up drinking, so they said to hell with it, and started drinking again, only even more heavily than before.

So they're probably not going to want to read Mr. Surber's latest book, Trump the Establishment: The Elitists Never Learned in 2016