As Democrats Go, So Goes The Old Media
By Vincent Fiore (12/29/04)
In a few weeks, George W. Bush will be sworn into office, thereby acknowledging the will of 61 million voters who opted to see Bush finish what Al-Qaeda started. What the next four years will be like for Bush is as uncertain as your typical five-day weather forecast. What it brings for the Democratic Party and the establishment media, is possibly four more years of parenthetic futility and failure.
Rather than retell the past year’s numerous and ill-fated attempts by the media to assassinate the Bush reelection campaign, I thought we could draw some conclusions on what we have seen from the media and the team that they play for, the Democratic Party.
But to limit this to one or two years is…limiting. The demise of the mainstream media juxtapositions nicely with the demise of the Democrats, a pageantry of sorts that started out in earnest when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980.
Reagan was greeted by the liberal press much the same way people observed Bush being perceived by them in 2000. The media of Reagan’s day--sneering, loathing, and haughtily superior--never changed stride when it came to George W. Bush.
So as the media pounded Reagan for tax cuts, a military buildup, and “Star Wars,” as Reagan’s missile defense initiative was derisively dubbed, Democrats, from House Speaker Tip O’Neill to one-time Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, began a near-symbiotic relationship with their media cheerleaders on the basis of the liberal ideology they shared. Rarely did their scornful words for Reagan differ in content.
Through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the establishment media that had helped Democrats to power by not only sharing their core beliefs, but by propagating them, started to erode. By 2000, Democrats had lost all their majorities in Washington, and were now in the minority in regard to state governorships and legislative bodies.
After this election, the media suffered the same debilitating loses as did the Democrats. The nightly news broadcast, cable channels that featured a progressive slanting of news, and the once-revered New York Times, all suffered for the sins of blatant partisanship, omission of fact, and even fabrication of news, or as I call them, political “drive-bys.”
(Dan Rather and “Memogate” come to mind here)
The “traditional” Democratic Party is certainly a minority party, and destined to get even smaller. The inter-party bloodletting has just begun, with the special interest groups--dyed in the wool liberals--positioning themselves to wrest ideological control from longtime party patriarchs.
The Democratic Party, once the majority party for a strong military, tax cuts, and promoting democracy abroad, is being splintered by the likes of MoveOn.org, ushering in a new platform that champions gay marriage, unlimited abortion, and “sovereignty” under the U.N. flag, all issues that receive a minority of support.
It will be interesting to see if the mainstream media have their own “fight for their soul” among themselves, or settle for business as usual. Be it the party of Howard Dean Democrats or the party of JFK, the establishment media will probably opt for whomever showcases their liberal pre-dispositions the best. The thought of actually reporting news without the bias attached to it is still a generation away.
But that’s tomorrow’s news. Today’s news is that the Democratic Party and the mainstream media they relied on for far too long and for far too much, are both leading each other down a dead-end street. Gone are the halcyon days of uninterrupted issue-shaping and indoctrination, as gone as the Democratic Party’s stranglehold of power in Washington.
A good friend of mine who involves himself in political pursuits, asked me if I thought the establishment media was leading the Democratic Party down a path of political impotency, or was it the Democrats leading the media down a path of impoverishment in regard to legitimacy among the electorate?
Truly, I had no easy answer for him. Today’s Democrats come from the same cloistered towers of liberal academia that yesterday’s establishment media came from during the second half of the century, or is it the other way around?
Regardless, this parasitic union of a party and its very own press corps d'elite is spiraling ever-downward by the very shackles they formed together—link-by-shameful-link.
So really, in the end, it doesn’t matter at all. Whether it is the Democratic Party hierarchy or the establishment media that captains this boat that was launched so many years ago, they are in rough seas now, and at present coarse, an iceberg lies dead ahead.
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