" Romney's claim that his experience at Bain Capital somehow qualified him to run a country's economy has always been a joke. Romney can't make money off America via the Bain model unless he runs for the leader of another country, buys America, fires a large percentage of the American workforce, reneges on American pensions and health plans, then somehow flips America to some dipshit country while he and every other vampire he works with stands around trying to count on their swollen, diabetic white-guy fingers the number of lives they've just destroyed. "

" What I had meant to describe specifically was the construction of a full-blown alternative media ecosystem, which has been become more self-sufficient and self-contained as it’s become more interconnected. ... That does not mean conservatives are completely cut off from outside information — as David Brooks notes today, research suggests that frequent visitors to partisan sites are actually more likely to also visit “the enemy” — but it tends to be approached in roughly the same spirit we might read the Korean Central News Agency. "

" The output may have varying degrees of liberal slant, but The New York Times is not fundamentally trying to be liberal; they’re trying to get it right. Their conservative counterparts—your Fox News and your Washington Times—always seem to be trying, first and foremost, to be the conservative alternative. And that has implications for how each of them connects to the whole ecosystem of media: Getting an accurate portrait is institutionally secondary to promoting the accounts and interpretations that support the worldview and undermine the liberal media narrative. "
...
" There’s another explanation that’s related to the rise of what I’ve called the politics of ressentiment... So here’s a hypothesis: Epistemic closure is (in part) an attempt to compensate for the collapse of geographic closure. A function no longer effectively served by geographic segregation—because the digital equivalents of your local hangout are open to invasion by the hordes from New York and London—is being passed to media segregation, bolstered by the sudden demand that what was once tacit and given be explicitly defended. "

" One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) "