A media affliction.

Waaaah! Waaaah! Waaaah! There, that's better. See, I'm a baby boomer. And according to George Will, "baby boomers have perfected the art of whining." When we lose our jobs, when we don't get a raise for four years, when we see our friends and relatives laid off, we act like a bunch of spoiled brats. Our "entitlement mentality" prompts us to "just expect a pain-free world" and "risk-free economy." It's time to grow up, kids. Just like Georgie has, with his annual salary of roughly $1.5 million. You don't see him exhibiting an entitlement mentality!

It really makes my Sunday morning when yet another millionaire goes on television to tell us it's just our imaginations that we can't quite pay the bills.

In its ongoing campaign to persuade viewers that the economy is really booming and that job insecurity is just a media-induced delusion, This Week with David Brinkley (Brinkley--estimated annual income of over $1 million, plus a $20,000 to $30,000 fee for a forty-minute speech) once again trotted out Robert "it's-all-in-your-head" Samuelson.

Samuelson insisted that the problem lies in our expectations; if we didn't expect so much, then we wouldn't be disappointed. So, if you expect to be canned or to have to work two jobs to makes ends meet, then you won't feel so bad about getting a pink slip. After all, you can't blame companies that are simply "trying not to get overburdened with excessive costs."

Will and Samuelson had a neocon circle jerk. Samuelson bemoaned the fact that "this entitlement psychology has attained a massive grip on popular consciousness." But you can be sure that no such "entitlement mentality" grips Robert Allen, CEO of AT&T (salary: $3.4 million) or Walter Shipley, CEO of Chemical/Chase Manhattan ($2.5 million). CEOs deserve their average pay raise of 18 percent, Will and Samuelson told us.

Our problem (besides our whining) is that we've been manipulated by the media (a media which, by the way, just discovered the selling power of downsizing stories two months ago). Articles about economic growth are often "buried or ignored," This Week told us, while layoffs are front-page news. "Such stories can plant seeds of doubt and insecurity."

So stop reading the papers and watching the news. Just chat with your happy, secure co-workers who have lots of extra time for their kids, their partners, their friends, and their aging parents, and you'll see that the world is as financially safe for you as it is for Will and Samuelson.

Of course the media is a problem. Just ask pundit Michael Barone, to whom facts are clearly an alien concept. "The mainstream press is dominated by feminist, pro-choice, pro-abortion-rights people," he huffed recently on The McLaughlin Group.

Now this I find especially rich. A media watchdog group--Women, Men, and the Media--recently documented that news coverage of women dropped in 1995, and the percentage of stories reported by female correspondents on the network news shows also fell. Only 14 percent of the oped pieces in The Washington Post and only 15 percent in The New York Times were by women. And the Times replaced Anna Quindlen with the avowedly anti-feminist Maureen Dowd, who writes as if she were William Safire in drag.

In fact, one of the big but quiet changes in the press recently has been the takeover of op-ed pages by the right and by antifeminist. Take USA Today. In 1995 it actually had one of the best op-ed records, with 33 percent of its pieces written by women. Don't expect that record in 1996. Management of the op-ed page has swung far right, and the women they do feature now, like the deplorable Linda Chavez, make Phyllis Schlafly seem demure.

Funded by the right, groups like Beverly LeHaye's Concerned Women for America and the Independent Women's Forum have succeeded in placing antifeminist op-ed pieces throughout the mainstream media, while all too many feminists find their submissions rejected or ignored. But see, there I go whining again.

Do you know why Ted Kaczynski became the alleged Unabomber? Yep, you guessed it--mom. Evan Thomas in Newsweek acknowledged that "blaming one's mother is the oldest and least original excuse in history," but then added that "something must have caused him to go on an eighteen-year bombing spree." That something was Wanda Kaczynski. (Forget dad--he doesn't count.)

We learn that Ted had to be hospitalized and isolated from his parents when he was six months old, damaging his self-esteem and making him "uneasy about his mother's love." Then mom had a second child she had to pay attention to. Sheesh! Worst of all, she "demanded academic excellence" and made him listen to her read from Scientific American.

When he grew up, another woman finished the job, dumping poor Ted after a brief romance. Then, boom--the letter bombs started arriving.

Now I'm not sure which piece of pundit psychobabble is dumber, this or the notion that the inequitable distribution of wealth is a mass delusion based on a newly identified pathology called "entitlement mentality." The real pathology is "pundit arrogance"--an affliction that results when a really big, fat paycheck, complicated by a solid dose of male privilege, prevents you from understanding facts or seeing everyday people's lives. The disease is transmitted most frequently on the Sunday news shows, and it's highly contagious.