I loved many things about this review of six books at once, which was really more of a discussion of six books at once, and appeared in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.

I loved that it is about media economics and was written by a federal appeals court judge who is also a blogger. I mean, how deliciously nerdy. I love that the judge, Richard Posner, writes as if he’s delivering a decision on a complicated case, taking time to first dispense with sideshow matters that tend to get the most attention and then narrowing in on what are actually “the interesting questions.” Finally, I love that he just will not allow journalism to be seen as anything other than a product, primarily, of economic forces. Those who write for a living, and those who criticize those who write for a living that should cover just about everyone in America should print this long piece out and enjoy a trip through Posner’s sharp and beautifully unsentimental mind. (Oh, and he also has some very smart things to say about “parasitic” blogs and “derivative” bloggers.) A taste:

Journalists are reluctant to confess to pandering to their customers’ biases; it challenges their self-image as servants of the general interest, unsullied by commerce. They want to think they inform the public, rather than just satisfying a consumer demand no more elevated or consequential than the demand for cosmetic surgery in Brazil or bullfights in Spain. They believe in ”deliberative democracy” - democracy as the system in which the people determine policy through deliberation on the issues. In his preface to ”The Future of Media” (a collection of articles edited by Robert W. McChesney, Russell Newman and Ben Scott), Bill Moyers writes that ”democracy can’t exist without an informed public.” If this is true, the United States is not a democracy (which may be Moyers’s dyspeptic view). Only members of the intelligentsia, a tiny slice of the population, deliberate on public issues.