Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Slate Edition)

Penguins on the Equator watches Jack Shafer of Slate make a fool of himself:

Penguins on the Equator: An unfunny joke: Jack Shafer takes a detour into political science in his new column, which deals with how journalists are convinced (in his view, wrongly) of their importance to the smooth functioning of democracy:

If there is a profession that doesn't think it's essential to the steady rotation of the planet around the sun, I've never heard of it. (A couple of years ago, a Harvard political scientist got so carried away with waving the flag for special interests that he declared that bowling leagues were vital to the commonweal, and their decline a tragedy.)

This succeeds more as a decisive demonstration that Shafer knows very little about political science than as a joke.... Shafer's pithy summary doesn't exactly do justice to the actual work. Of course it isn't just about bowling leagues. But then, you'd have had to read the thing to know that.