Ed Driscoll has a few things to say about the fall of the mainstream media. He quotes from John Nolte.
Mainstream news outlets have been caught off guard before, but they used to play catch up. Today they play "hide the ball." For as long as I've been politically aware the media's been biased, but willfully ignoring a major national news story at great cost to their credibility and relevance is a new low. So what changed?
Ironically enough, scrutiny and accountability is the cause of much of the media's increasingly disgraceful behavior.
Once trailblazer media watchdogs like talk radio, The Media Research Center and Bernard Goldberg were joined with the awesome power of the Internet and Fox News, the media's sins of omission and commission could no longer be hidden from the general public, or denied. This gave the Fourth Estate two options. They could either: A) Clean up their act and do their jobs honorably ... or B) Surrender their fig leafs of objectivity and run amok as the ideologues they really are.
Doing their jobs honorably would mean a setback for the Leftist cause, and so they chose B.
The good news is that this appears to be a suicide run.
The Dinosaur Media is losing money, viewers and readers hand over fist. The reason they're folding or on life support isn't because there aren't enough left-of-center Americans to keep them in business, it's because, like everyone else, liberals don't want to sit in a choir and be preached to. They want information. They want to know what's going on in the world.
Our liberal friends may not like hearing Van Jones, the NEA and ACORN are under fire, but they still want to know. What a disappointing revelation it must be to open the New York Times or turn on the network news only to discover after the curtain has already fallen that one of Obama's Czars was forced to resign or that the U.S. Census Bureau let ACORN go.
The liberal media is failing for the exact same reason a dozen-plus anti-war films flopped: propaganda is dull.
It is not just that propaganda is dull. When reality diverges sufficiently from "information" mistakes are made.
Now here is a human interest story from the comments at Ed Driscoll's blog. The comments! The kind of story you would hope to find in your reading matter. The kind that is currently missing in action.
14. betsybounds:
Increase Mather:
With respect to your mention of the foreign press's estimates of crowd size this week-end, to wit: "NYTIMES, CNN continue to put the crowd in the "thousands" ...foreign press has it at well over a million"
I don't know what the actual size was, but I was interested to note that Fox News' Chris Wallace, on this morning's Fox News Sunday, put the estimate at "tens of thousands." It seems that everyone, including the notoriously "conservative" Fox, has some kind of interest in minimizing the turn-out numbers. I think, having watched the thing yesterday on C-SPAN, that a count of tens of thousands is a deliberate low-ball (and low-life) estimate-it was WAY more than that.
I have a good friend at work whose husband went to the Washington Tea Party this week-end. She told me that he was getting ready to head out to DC last week, and went to a local Dollar General to buy some American Flags. He ran into a couple of elderly ladies who wondered why he was buying those flags, and he told them where he was getting ready to head out to. One of the ladies was using a walker, and she began to cry, and the other one went to the back of the store where the flags were shelved, took all the remaining ones off the shelf, and went to the check-out line to buy them all and give them to him. The cashier also, upon hearing what my friend's husband was doing, pitched in, and so those 3 people together bought out the store's entire stock of American flags and gave them to my friend's husband. He left, with the back of his pick-up filled up with American flags to take to Washington, purchased with the good will and strong sentiment of three utterly random American citizens. I am confident that every person at the event can be held to have represented at least 3 additional Americans, who could not be there.
This is a true story. I'm confident that it's not unique among the stories of this Tea Party. It's a story that Mr. Obama and his minions, and the Democrats in Congress, would do well to heed. I think the American people are not going to sit still for what they see coming. I wasn't so sure about this a couple of months ago, but I'm seeing something surprising: The American people are not going to submit. God grant us all that they (we) never will.
And this was just some ordinary citizen with no J-School training writing from the heart. With stuff as good as that or better available all over the 'net for the price of an ISP connection why bother with papers any more? With better coverage of town hall protests on YouTube than your local TV station why bother with television?
I am honored to say that I had a little to do with the creation of the Internet. May it live long and prosper.
"they could either: A) Clean up their act and do their jobs honorably ... or B) Surrender their fig leafs of objectivity and run amok as the ideologues they really are."
You can interpret the MSM behavior in two more ways. C) They choose to fight on the grounds that they alone produce valid news....or D) They realize that they could no longer profit without subsidies and now receive large secret funding.
I will outline what might be expected from strategy C or D,
C) The old media sneer at the internet, blogs, and any who differed with them such as FOX. They would attack talk radio. They would also court academics and Nobel winners for prestige. They would want the FCC and Congress to limit talk radio and reduce freedom on the internet.
Notice the MSM is still free to do fine and objective work under this scenario. They would be seeking to enhance their position and convince others that they alone do excellent work.
D) In a few words they would align with the wishes of their secret sponsors. That is a difficult strategy but it would work best if reporters and others with different views were gradually purged or made silent.
Producers and publishers would take more direct control of stories so that 'mistakes' would not be aired or printed.
Like C) they would try to limit or eliminate talk radio and freedom on the internet.
D) would also make the captive media encourage stronger hate crime laws and vigorous enforcement. The premise being that the enforcement would be selective and could be aimed at others.
K · September 14, 2009 2:11 AM
And sadly, there's a good chance that every single one of those american flags they bought were made in china.
Robert · September 14, 2009 2:11 PM
Let us hope that it give the Chinese making them ideas.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
"they could either: A) Clean up their act and do their jobs honorably ... or B) Surrender their fig leafs of objectivity and run amok as the ideologues they really are."
You can interpret the MSM behavior in two more ways. C) They choose to fight on the grounds that they alone produce valid news....or D) They realize that they could no longer profit without subsidies and now receive large secret funding.
I will outline what might be expected from strategy C or D,
C) The old media sneer at the internet, blogs, and any who differed with them such as FOX. They would attack talk radio. They would also court academics and Nobel winners for prestige. They would want the FCC and Congress to limit talk radio and reduce freedom on the internet.
Notice the MSM is still free to do fine and objective work under this scenario. They would be seeking to enhance their position and convince others that they alone do excellent work.
D) In a few words they would align with the wishes of their secret sponsors. That is a difficult strategy but it would work best if reporters and others with different views were gradually purged or made silent.
Producers and publishers would take more direct control of stories so that 'mistakes' would not be aired or printed.
Like C) they would try to limit or eliminate talk radio and freedom on the internet.
D) would also make the captive media encourage stronger hate crime laws and vigorous enforcement. The premise being that the enforcement would be selective and could be aimed at others.