To borrow a phrase from Isaac Asimov, future generations of historians will look back and somewhere in the last eight years, they will draw a line and say, “This marks the fall of the mainstream media.” (Always assuming the world lasts that long, that we don’t blow ourselves up or something.) Orson Scott Card, the science fiction/fantasy author and writing professor, lays out the reasons why in a blistering attack on the MSM: they’ve chosen to ignore some stories, downplay others, and spend their time inventing new ones, in order to advance the cause of their chosen agenda and candidates, and in the process have become “just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party.”This is not a new thing, nor should it be surprising. As my father-in-law pointed out to me a while ago, the rise of modern standards of journalistic integrity, of the idea that journalists should be fair and impartial and treat all reasonable points of view equally, was driven and made possible by the rise of mass media that made it possible for the first time to market products on a nationwide basis. If you’re going to try to sell things to the whole country at once, you need to appeal to the whole country at once, which means that for your news division, a convincingly impartial approach is necessary so as not to turn anyone off. As Jon Shields, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado—Colorado Springs, has pointed out, this was made possible by the consensus-oriented, largely unideological centrism of post-World War II American politics.The problem is, both of the foundations of that approach to journalism are gone; Dr. Shields’ article tells the story of how liberal activists shattered that 1950s centrism, and mass marketing has largely been replaced by niche marketing. You pick a segment of the population and you make money by giving them what they want; along with that goes telling them what they want to hear. The only things left of the grand postwar era of American journalism are the major media corporations it created, which are now in varying states of disrepair, and their abiding conviction that they are the arbiters of truth and impartiality. (Hence their flaming contempt for that upstart Fox, which challenges the latter and competes with them for money.) We on the outside are free to see that that conviction is an illusion—and always was, really—and that the man behind the curtain is the abiding form of journalism in a capitalist society, to which we have returned after a brief aberration. Call it yellow journalism if you like (I for one think that’s fair), but don’t be surprised by it; remember, the highest award for journalism is the Pulitzer Prize—named after, and established by, none other than Joseph Pulitzer.Remember, you can’t count on the media to tell you what’s true. You have to figure that out for yourself.
Liberal activists shattered “1950’s centrism”? Leaving the idea that “1950’s centrism” is a mythological beast aside, are you seriously getting misty-eyed for the era of Jim Crow? Because without those horrid “liberal activists”, no civil rights advancements would have been made for the past 150 years (not to mention worker’s rights, anti-trust laws, and banal things we take for granted like food safety). And somehow they also *single-handedly* created niche marketing? It had nothing to do with changing demographics, or changing economics, or a culture of consumption, or tehcnological changes? It was just those filthy liberal activists going around shattering the good ol’ days of the mythological 1950’s?
Are you serious?
I mean, of course I agree that the media is biased. But I think these claims are pretty hard to swallow.
Read the article, Doug; evidently you missed my earlier post on it. What Shields is talking about has nothing to do with that and everything to do with the process by which candidates are nominated–the story begins with the 1968 DNC and commences in earnest with the rules changes for the 1972 DNC.