The demise of the American Mainstream Media Party

[Will Robinson]

Howard Fineman has nailed it in this article linkage

Nice to see them finally recognize the truth now that it's crumbling down around them.

[KlubMarcus]

http://www.lonestartimes.com/

[Iceman]

They made their own bed, let them sleep in it. I say good riddance ...

[woodchip]

Nice to see them finally recognize the truth now that it's crumbling down around them.

Only some in the media understand this. I think there are still an awful lot who don't "get it" in any real conjectural way. When the crowd you swing with is all attached to the same clock, it is hard to know the ticking is coming from another time piece.

[Ferno]

lol. i just knew they would say something like "it's the liberal media's fault"

[Skyalmian]

Will, Woodchip, here's something else on the MSM. I was going to throw it into a new thread to let the Leftists cry about more media bashing, but decided to put it here instead.

It's from a Task Force (Battalion +) Commander in Iraq. "Aiding and Abetting the Enemy" by Lt. Col. Tim Ryan via Blackfive (first saw it mentioned here). Yet Another Excellent Read (TM).

[Lothar]

I keep meaning to write about CBS and the forged memos... suffice it to say, there's good reason the mainstream media is losing power.

I forget where I read this, but somebody recently argued this is going to be really good for Democrats -- because for the last 30 years, they've basically had the media as a party extension (even though they're completely unwilling to admit it.) This has led to the Democratic party mostly being shielded from the best criticisms, and therefore, never growing or being forced to adapt.

With the media crumbling, the party might finally start getting some good new ideas.

[bash]

Lothar, it was Taranto's column (although not his words):

The descent of the U.S. media into liberal advocacy has been to the detriment of the country, notwithstanding the service done by it to the country during Watergate and--partially--Vietnam (partially because Vietnam was winnable prior to bad decisions made in Washington during the 1962-65 time frame, but probably not thereafter, but the media would never allow that position to be acknowledged). The biggest loss to the country has been the emasculation of the Democratic Party.

In large part due to the ideological congruence between the AMMP and the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party's main function has been subsumed by the AMMP. It is the AMMP that sets the liberal agenda, and the Democrats follow. It is the AMMP that makes the most effective challenges to conservatives, and the Democrats merely echo them. The AMMP is a much more effective shadow government than the Democrats are. As a result the Democrats have become vain, intellectually lazy and self-righteous. This dynamic is also visible in your item on Jill Lawrence's article the previous day.

And the AMMP still doesn't get it. When Dan Rather states that the media's role is to "speak truth to power," he overlooks the fact that the AMMP is a power. Cloaked in its mantle of pretend objectivity, the AMMP desires to influence governance for the common good as it alone sees it, and it really does. Voters like me not only repudiated the AMMP in 2004, but we consciously did so because a proper balance of power within government demands that the Republican Party be strengthened against the AMMP so that the two are roughly equal in influence. As long as the Democratic Party is favored by the AMMP, it must be relegated to the backbench, to be brought into play only when we face Republican incompetence or corruption.

The AMMP was negated by bloggers in this election, imo. The MSM lost it's monopoly on information dissemination and it's power to pursuade and spin as it sees fit without question dried up. Without the blogs as a counterweight, I believe Kerry would have won.

[Ford Prefect]

Oddly I was working for the week away from home and the hotel I stayed in has a small shelf of old books more to add atmosphere than anything else. I ran out of reading matierial and picked one up. "The Camera Never Blinks" a ghost written autobiography of Dan Rather written in 1977. Hard to believe he is still in the buisness.
The book covered his career through university and covering the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Kennedy/King asassinations to Watergate. Again and again he expresses suprise that reporting the story as it occured, reporting what he saw as the "truth", got him labeled as taking sides. Screamed at on airplanes, shunned by former friends, his life and that of his children threatened regularly.
Sometimes I think there is a strong element of "shoot the messenger" mentality in labeling the press as in the pockets of the Left. Even the linked article discusses the difference between the Main Stream Media Party and established political parties.
Vietnam was a mistake, the press and others exposed that. They didn't make the mistake. They didn't tell the lies about what was being bombed when. They just reported it.
Richard M. Nixon was a lying, manipulative, insecure President. He WAS a "crook" and got caught. That was not the fault of the press, just the story they reported to up their ratings.

[Will Robinson]

Ford I think the breaking point was when the mainstream media went beyond reporting the facts regarding vietnam and began openly building the case against the war. They went from an objective courtroom reporter to a prosecutorial assistant role.
No one at the time saw any harm in it because the cause was just and the same with Watergate. Didn't Woodward and Bernstien use a false story at one point to add to the weight of their anti-Nixon reporting? No one cared because Nixon was so bad, it was considered a minor thing...an honest mistake.

So the invisible line was crossed and they never retreated. They have been "fighting the good fight" ever since not just relaying the facts and letting the people decide. The problem is "the good fight" isn't so pure any more, not so "good" and their army is just as corrupt as their enemys army. So now they are often found on one side of the story instead of just relaying it to us. And sometimes they are even found behind the story as the creators of the story and that is where we finally decided enough is enough.

[Ford Prefect]

Interesting comments Will. I don't watch television news and live in Canada so don't read many U.S. papers either. I don't see a reaction like that here but certainly news coverage seems to be slipping into the catagory of "Infotainment". When you are in a ratings war I guess bad things are done just like any conflict.

[KlubMarcus]

Another one bites the dust!

CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan quit Friday amidst a furor over remarks he made in Switzerland last month about journalists killed by the U.S. military in Iraq. Jordan said he was quitting to avoid CNN being "unfairly tarnished" by the controversy.

During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum last month, Jordan said he believed that several journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq had been targeted.

He accuses US soldiers of targeting reporters without evidence while working as a news executive. Then he has to quit his job due to "controversy". Looks like someone set his house on fire, eh?

[Skyalmian]

He accuses US soldiers of targeting reporters without evidence while working as a news executive. Then he has to quit his job due to "controversy". Looks like someone set his house on fire, eh?

Yeah. CNN would have gone down hardcore if the videotape was released while they were still stonewalling over it.

Funny that the [Conservative] bloggers just want the truth, and the MSM refuses to give it.

Summarization of the Eason Jordan Story Here

[dissent]

Will, Sky,
Nice links. Thanks for the news. Maybe someday the major organizations will get a clue that if they did a better job of reporting the news, that people might come back and listen to them. Oh wait, let me hold my breath ...........well, maybe not.

Natural selection, and they're losing.

[Skyalmian]

Natural selection, and they're losing.

They know, and they're angry.

In what's been labeled "The MSM Strikes Back", they're lashing out at the truth mob for the Eason Jordan story they wanted to ignore. Here's one such example...

[dissent]

. Good one. May democracy prevail.