I missed this essay by The Anchoress when she first posted it this past spring, but apparently, it's still very much in demand:

I suggest that when Mohammed Atta and his pals killed 3000 Americans in New York, and a few hundred more in Washington, D.C., they also struck a blow to the Popular Culture and its providers, which buckled their knees and left them breathless. Regrouping, that culture has spent the last four years staggering about the ring on wobbly pins, insisting that they are alright, that nothing has changed, but the crowd, sensing a loser, is starting to jeer. It may never receive a fatal blow, but its championship days are surely behind it.

People are weary of being lectured to by the media and the culture it promotes. They are tired of being told via sitcoms that their values are silly or via senators that the people they elect are losers. They are tired of reading that the traditions they wish to share within their communities are divisive if they insult an atheist, with no corresponding recognition that an atheist’s tirade is often filled with hate. They are sick of turning on a good cop drama, looking for an hour’s simple entertainment, only to learn that people like themselves, who hold with deeply-held religious beliefs, are really monsters of unenlightened hatred. To get away from that, they flip to C-span, just in time to learn that their traditional family units are insultingly heteronormative.

Wherever consumers of mainstream news and entertainment turn they are being lectured to by a punch-drunk media telling them that the terrorists they rightly disrespect are their moral equals, that relativism is truth and truth is unknowable, that their children are incapable of self-restraint, that failure to appreciate their elite and enlightened betters make them “knuckle-dragging, salivating morons.” They listen to elected officials like Ted Kennedy, a so-called icon of public service refer to them – the public he is supposed to be serving - as “Neanderthals.”

The mainstream media have a strong left hook, and they have used it to bludgeon the sensibilities of a trusting, agreeable and curious public for decades. But in the weeks and months after 9/11, the public saw the gods and goddesses of television wonder if their Emmy awards should not be held at a military installation, because, of course, the terrorists would want to hurt our prettiest people. They listened to so-called comedians like Bill Maher suggest that a celebrity pedophile “servicing” a young boy sexually was not as bad as a beating by a schoolyard bully. They watched an old-guard news anchor, on the eve of a national election, promote demonstrably faked documents questioning the military service of one candidate, even as he resolutely refused to ask a single question about the credibly-doubted service of another candidate, and they realized that the towering heavy-weight they had long supported was nothing but a chump who perhaps, finally, needed to be brought down with a good uppercut from the right.

What has happened to the mainstream media, in all of its incarnations, is this: The champion, the Mighty Pop Culture, has taken a hit and gone down. It will probably rise again, but never with the same mythic status of a favorite. Once humbled and brought down, its weaknesses have been exposed; the crowd will watch knowingly, just as ready to jeer as to cheer.

Whether the giant egos who manage from the corners can handle the laughter remains to be seen.