Jay Currie makes an observation which is much more interesting decontextualized and expanded upon:

In the comments at RightGirl’s highly entertaining blog Linda from PumpkinWatch provides this rather wonderful quote from the old trickster himself, Malcolm Muggeridge:

Back in 1977 Malcolm Muggeridge had this to say (in his book Christ and the Media):

"There is something, to me, very sinister about this emergence of a weird kind of conformity, or orthodoxy, particularly among the people who operate the media, so that you can tell in advance exactly what they will say and think about anything. It is true that so far they have not got an Inquisition to enforce their orthodoxy, but they do have ways of enforcing it which make the old thumbscrews and racks seem quite paltry."

pumpkin patch via rightgirl

I find this apposite in light of the Zerb’s inability to deal with positions and facts which contradict her own - and her colleague’s orthodoxy.

Aside from the fact (and the thrill) that this is a four-layer deep quotation, the really interesting thing is the failure of Jay to note that he is merely examplifying the exchange of one orthodoxy for another - and the creation of a far more powerfully dangerous one at that.

Just as pre-Internet mass media by necessity created orthodoxy by editorial policies and the fact of fewer voices than the marketplace, our present-day Internet mass media as currently constructed disassembles the complexity of actual community further by drilling homogeneity far further into society, the home and the mind. It would never have occurred to a media mogul of the mere electronic age to rely in every issue on the creation of the straw man, the false opposition to prop up and knockdown to assert (or really just allege) credibility; to divide the world into left and right, us and them, bad and good in the way that every issue is divided through blogging and is lowering every discussion to a challenge to the reader's personal sense of security, thereby encouraging loyalty to the given brand of the dichotomy one accepts - creating conformity to policy without the need of central administration.   [It is perhaps roughly analogous to the pamphleteering in the town square or rather backrooms of the mid-1600s but with only one back room and a couple of pamphlets.]

Through fascilitating the discarding of ethics and professionalism in the issuance into the public space of opinion (or, worse, especially "opinion" in the guise of news) we find ourselves left only with the mob - and no tool meets the need of the mob like the Internet does. Perhaps that is why is it so handy to those who would actually bring actual violence upon us in the name of their particular belief in or brand of stupidity.