Is The Party Over For Mainstream Media?
By Richard Davis (01/21/05)
A few months ago my credit card company suckered me into buying a year’s subscription to Time magazine for just $19. I figured what the heck. I could see what the elite media were up to for 30 some cents an issue. But now, with the magazine appearing week after week like a recurring virus, I’d pay another $19 just to make it stop. I’ve seen enough.
And what I’ve seen raises a question: With public disfavor over media bias threatening the very existence of big media today, why are they moving so blatantly to the left? That is, why are they becoming more biased? Wouldn’t they try to moderate their liberalism somewhat to protect their credibility and market share? The answer is, I think, they can’t help themselves. They are what they are. Ask Michael Moore to be more fair and balanced.
The fact is we’re all choosing sides these days. We’ve lost our ideological innocence. The era of national “consensus” journalism, when Uncle Walter could say “that’s the way it is” and not be refuted, is coming to an end.
Howard Fineman of Newsweek admitted as much last week in an MSNBC article, “The Media Party is Over.” Fineman wrote: “A political party is dying before our eyes -- and I don’t mean the Democrats. I’m talking about the ‘mainstream media’…”
Fineman identified three primary suspects: increased competition (Fox and the internet), “fraying journalistic standards,” and, first and foremost, the “opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush’s Republican Party.” Wouldn’t you know Bush would figure in there somewhere? In liberaldom, Bush is now the leading cause of, well, just about everything. Got hemorrhoids? Here’s some anti-Bush cream.
Of course Fineman finds no culpability on the part of the press itself. Only the “best of intentions” there. Like the blue-ribbon panel that investigated the CBS Rathergate scandal, Fineman looks high and low and doesn’t see liberal bias anywhere. Must be neocon spin. Like the true liberal elite he is, Fineman sees only victims, himself included this time.
How sad. The elites can’t even get their own obituary right. Bush has had almost nothing to do with the demise of the liberal media. On the other hand, blaming Bush has. The media’s rabid hatred for this administration has exposed their bias to full public view. It’s not a pretty site. In the past that didn’t matter. The public had no choice but to take what the media gave them. Now it’s different.
The rise of the internet has validated one of the oldest axioms of Americanism -- that a free, competitive marketplace of ideas is the best avenue to the truth. We didn’t need Rathergate to remind us of that. Our media, however, did. They still like to talk about a free press but say nothing these days about a competitive press -- which isn’t surprising given that they are owned lock, stock and barrel by large corporate monopolies.
So if the Mainstream Media Party is over what’s next? Nobody’s figured that out. Most observers see the approach of European-style media in which journalists are more upfront about their ideological predilections. The internet and Fox seem to be precursors of that trend.
But big media aren’t throwing in their towels just yet. Those monopolies are cash cows, which is why corporate heads stay buried so deeply in the sand when the subject of bias comes up. What bias? We still speak for everybody. Sure, we might be a little too eager at times, but that’s not bias. Ask our lawyers. Journalists like Fineman are professionals. They’re trained to be objective. (Which is true. Objectivity has always been a handmaiden of liberalism. The problem today is that liberalism has begun to freelance on its own.)
Like it or not, the market may force changes soon. The media’s public trust is shot, customer satisfaction is plummeting, young people show almost no inclination to read newspapers or watch network news, and the internet, the most revolutionary information system of modern times, is only in its infancy. When Americans are able to access the web on their TVs as easily and routinely as they do cable channels, then the media enter a brave new world.
Even then, change won’t come easy. Big media have a labor problem -- that is, their labor is a problem. It’s moving left, and their customers are moving right. Where would truly mainstream, nonideological journalists come from? The universities indoctrinate only leftists, and the industry’s diversity hiring initiatives insure that new workers are not only left of traditional liberal hires, they’re agenda driven and open about it. They control the PC agenda, which controls the industry, including hiring. CBS producer Mary Mapes, the villainess of Rathergate, was a radical feminist with issues, and everybody knew it. She is the face of 21st Century journalism, not Dan Rather. If not for those memos, she’s still climbing the corporate news ladder.
Fineman says that “the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it’s pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things.” That’s a liberal for you. It’s the public’s fault (thanks to Republicans, Fox and our own incompetence) that we no longer have a neutral, nonbiased media. The media didn’t change; the public did.
To the Finemans, neutrality isn’t something the journalist attains, something his reporting reflects, it’s public relations. Never does it occur to him that the media’s own growing partisanship might have killed the consensus. If the notion of a neutral mainstream media is pretty much dead it’s because the public is tired of being handed distortions and partial truths as if they were the whole story. It’s the public that wants the neutral press.
The Finemans and their notions worked so long as the public kept quite. You could pretend to be on everybody’s side, unbiased, directly in the mainstream. But you always knew. If you had half a brain you knew. Listen to the partisan, leftist rhetoric coming from Cronkite these days. He didn’t pick that bias up in retirement. The way it is was never really the way it was.
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