« Hah Skoo, Football starts tonight Shuffle | Home | Why do they hate her? »
Bad News for the Press… We’re going to see more of this.
By oceanguy | September 6, 2008
From the Washington Times.
Hundreds of angry people in this small town outside Milwaukee taunted reporters and TV crews traveling with Sen. John McCain on Friday, chanting “Be fair!” and pointing fingers at a pack of journalists as they booed loudly.
On the first leg of the “McCain Street USA” tour — which will take the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, to small towns across the heartland — the 30 or so reporters and crew were walking back to their buses to join the McCain motorcade when hundreds of townspeople started yelling.
“Stop lying! You are all liars! Tell the truth!” one woman yelled from the front of the pack.
One would think that outlets like the New York Times could look at their dwindling circulation and plummeting revenue and figure out that an increasing number of Americans are not interested in the biased and salacious reporting coming from the self-proclaimed Newspaper of Record of the United States. Spontaneous demonstrations like the one reported above are nothing but the next step of the people voicing frustration over the agenda driven media establishment. Until things change, it will only get worse for the MSM.
Journalists are stuck on stupid and almost completely unable to realize that alternative news sources are accessible to a much larger percentage of the general public. And another fact that journalists and editors are seemingly oblivious to, is that the percentage of the general public that is routinely well INFORMED, is informed because they are using a wide variety of news sources. No longer are we only reading the NYT and Washington Post and paying attention to the network news.
For at least a decade, the most informed segment of our population, the neighborhood and office opinion leaders, have been using that entire spectrum of news sources to inform ourselves. We still read the “old media” but… as news junkies and internauts, we have a vast array of additional news sources right at our fingertips. The distributed intelligence and collective experience of the blogosphere alone is awesome, but blogs are only a small portion of the total information available. Meanwhile, Journalists have responded to this change in news distribution by covering their ears and eyes and loudly singing, “LaLa Lalala, LaLa Lalala…” in a futile attempt to ignore their pesky critical audience.
Not used to being so often and so roundly criticized, journalists have responded, not by looking inwardly and adjusting their approach, but by answering the criticism with derision and an extremely self-absorbed hubris. They tell themselves… and the rest of us… how much smarter and better informed they are than We the People. But the reality is they are completely wrong. They are not… neither individually nor collectively… any more intelligent nor better informed nor any more qualified to discuss the events of the day than any of the well-informed population.
While ignorant of the reasons behind the animosity of the population towards their work, the media continue to lose influence and trust. Poorly researched articles, biased reporting of events, selective editing and selective reporting, have… instead of driving public opinion into the direction they desire… have only served to diminish their influence and reputations. The Times, They are a Changing.
I don’t think my experience is at all unique in the way I get my news and information… at least among the group, like me, that actively seek to inform themselves… the News Junkies.
For most of my adult life I subscribed to both my local newspaper and, when I wasn’t living in the DC metro area, I subscribed to one of the big national newspapers. I subscribed to Foreign Affairs, The New Republic and Commentary and at different times to Time or Newsweek. I listened to NPR’s Morning Addition and All Things Considered religiously, and … most importantly… I lived my life.
Like most of us over that time, I read some articles or editorials that I did not agree with and even spotted erroneous or inaccurate reports, but I generally trusted the professionals. But in 1984 I was involved in an event that put the first serious crack into that trust. Still, I continued to generally trust, though with a small dose of healthy skepticism, the newspapers and magazines I’d always read. But then I wound up living in England for 3 years.
In England I came to appreciate and admire the openly competitive environment their national press operated in. The newspapers, openly biased, competed with each other based on those biases. With some lateral movement among the journalists between media outlets, even through the bias, there was respect for factual, non-opinionated reporting. Additionally, the open competition could cause one paper to call another’s reporting out by pointing out inaccuracies and agenda driven articles. The final result was generally pretty high quality when looking at the whole of the establishment media. The informed, and the country’s opinion leaders routinely read 3 or four different papers… something we internauts are intimately familiar with in todays’ environment.
When I returned to America in 1988, I missed the variety of news sources that the different TV news broadcasters could not satisfy, but I easily settled back into reading the same magazines and newspapers I used to read. But I did find my desire for a variety of sources somewhat sated with the nascent internet. That didn’t change until sometime late in the Clinton Presidency… when the time that his salacious embarrassing White House behavior started to come to light. I began to get irritated at the biased, agenda-driven reporting I was reading regularly in the NYT… I cut my subscription to ‘Sunday only.
I had already substituted some of the time I would spend scanning and reading the NYT with time fiddling around online, so I was entirely comfortable giving up the daily NYT propaganda… I was one of those Prodigy subscribers in the early days of online services and migrated to AOL, and before then had done a lot of information gathering, for work and for leisure, using Gopher. Even then the amount of information… factual information… available in those early days was mind-boggling and so my dropping the daily NYT went virtually unnoticed.
I kept my Sunday NYT subscription for a few more years, until I just couldn’t take their agenda being force fed to me. With access to important news that the NYT deemed meaningless and ignored, I was familiar with many different sources of reporting which often contradicted the NYT reports. By 2001, like millions of others, I was thoroughly familiar and comfortable with a rapidly maturing internet that let me reach back to my experience in England and its’ competitive environment as I digested the news.
On stories that take my interest I never am happy with a single source, and I know I’m not alone. But along with reading the various news sources, blogs stepped in and facilitated “conversation” about that news among a huge number of informed, interested, and interesting people. The neighborhood pub and the corner coffee house conversations… formerly among just a handful of people… morphed into conversations among thousands… even hundreds of thousands of well-informed folks which included experts in a wide-spectrum of areas. The traditional media, in its old form, simply cannot compete with that.
Traditional media has reacted to the new reality like spoiled children who are forced to share their toys with unwanted visitors. They act superior to their audience… treating their audience like a bunch of rubes… and the audience has had enough. Condescension, on the part of the MSM towards their customers has caused a major backlash.
Talk radio was the first evidence of that back-lash, then blogs came along and the genie was truly out of the bottle. How this phenomenon has all surprised the MSM is the real mystery. It shows me they are even more ignorant than I thought… I’d given them way too much credit. but the bottom line is… the MSM has utterly failed to adjust to the new reality. No longer the opinion leaders they once were, they are resentful and are simply trying to regain the power and influence of a bygone era.
Generally bitter and virtually ignorant of the existential threat they face, the MSM has huddled together and have fallen into a circle the wagons mentality, effectively making the major news outlets monolithic… As I mentioned a few days ago, the MSM has become TASS like. In a quest for power and influence they have grasped on Unity in their struggle against the ignorant masses, and have willfully latched on to The One candidate that is most likely to promote that Unity. But America is too smart to allow that to happen.
America is wise to the media, and those folks in small town Wisconsin demonstrated it. There’s no reason to think the demonstration will not become a trend. The people are frustrated… the MSM is frustrated and they blame each other… but The MSM is on the wrong side of the issue and a Free America will not allow them to continue without comment.
The MSM has two options to regain their respect. 1. They can adapt to the new reality… or 2. They can change that reality, with the government’s help, and be legislated back into influence by limiting Freedom of Speech for the rest of us. All indications are that they, the MSM, have chosen the second option, and they believe that supporting BHO will help them achieve it. Again, they are wrong… America is too smart to fall for it.
Look for these types of spontaneous demonstrations to continue. It will be interesting to see how the MSM responds and which of the old media outlets are rendered obsolete by their stubborn refusal to adapt. The NYT just may be one of the first of the old establishment to fail… we’ll see.
Topics: Politics |
September 10th, 2008 at 5:19 am
[…] 6. Submitted by Soccer Dad - Somewhere on AIA: Bad News for the Press… We’re going to see more of this. […]
September 10th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
[…] 6. Submitted by Soccer Dad - Somewhere on AIA: Bad News for the Press… We’re going to see more of this. […]
September 12th, 2008 at 8:46 am
[…] Somewhere on AIA: Bad News for the Press… We’re going to see more of this 3rd place with 1 […]