Why is it that Howard Kurtz, Washington Post “media critic,” is paid, what, $200,000 a year, to yammer on and on for hundreds of words only to reveal his complete and utter cluelessness about politics and the media -- about anything, really -- while a “mere” blogger, namely Avedon Carol, who while an American, doesn’t even live in this country, can write, offhandedly and as part of her sideline activities, and from the other side of the Atlantic -- Britain -- no less, four sentences that more accurately and concisely portray the pathetic and deteriorating state of the “prestige” media in the U.S. today, and do so in a manner and with a flourish that puts to shame any of the random, nonsensical thoughts that might, just might, happen to pass through the pea brain of the man known to his protective buddies as “Howie,” but to those in the know as The Next Mrs. Rush Limbaugh?

Here is Carol writing, as it happens, primarily about her “hometown” paper, one she knows well, the aforementioned and perpetually declining Washington Post, though in context she clearly is referring to every leading print outlet in the U.S., the four sentences that say all too much about all too little:

[I]t just feels like such a waste of time to try to read stories by journalists who are really just reporting on what’s going on inside their own heads. Fair enough for me to do it on my own weblog, but no one’s paying me for this. But in The Newspapers of Record? It’s like a horrible joke, except that it’s not funny.

Ringing any bells, Alpha Girls?