WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: New Year’s Thoughts On The “News” That Isn’t News. “An unexpected consequence of blogging regularly has been that I spend more time with legacy media than ever before. The attempt to sift out the handful of stories each day that can help discerning readers trace the development of the world system inescapably involves at least a brief scan of the news catch of the day on display from the great news collecting agencies of our time. That experience has made me more critical of the legacy media than I was at the beginning.” Tell me about it.

Plus, Victor Davis Hanson: The No-News Stories of 2011. “Barack Obama simply does not expect to follow normal political customs and traditions because he knows the media do not expect him to: he will not release the transcripts because he does not have to and it is his pleasure not to, in the way he did not worry about explaining his near worship of his racist pastor of twenty years, or being the first to renounce public financing of presidential campaigns in the general election, or the first nominee in recent memory not to have released his medical records, or the first to have raised $1 billion dollars in private cash, or the first to have played 90 rounds of golf in his first three years in office. All of these may or may not be real issues, but they have always been real issues to the press and suddenly are no longer such—and Obama not only knows it, but enjoys knowing how the media exempts rather than audits him. Does a Chris Matthews understand just how much contempt Obama has for some one so sycophantic as himself?”