Saturday, September 13, 2008
Is there any way to keep up with the jaw-dropping mix of bias, arrogance, adulterated junk food, and obtuse stupidity that the American news media has on display for us this election year? Bloggers, talk-show hosts, and others who are about to replace the American news industry struggle to come up with the words that will, in effect, form its epitaph.
The recent flap over Sarah Palin's ABC interview with Charles Gibson has even sympathetic media observers agog. Just pick a random blog in the blogroll to the right and look. Start with Mary Madigan comparing the raw and doctored interviews, and finish up with this classic Simpsons clip (requires WMP 11 or IE7). Like the indispensable Onion, only parody can now do justice to the schlock, "advocacy," and strutting, vicious pretense -- both cutthroat and petty -- that make up so much of our so-called "news."
The core problem here is that Palin, limited as her political experience is, is smart, as well as direct and plain-spoken. Her mere existence highlights the phoniness of liberal and "progressive" politics. Her limited but real accomplishments in Alaska underscore, every time those intolerable boobs on MSNBC open their mouths, the empty hype and puffery of the Obama campaign.
So media-land is in a tizzy. I don't take polls that seriously, but one poll and survey after another in the last decade has indicated that a large swath of the voting public knows what they're seeing and reading and are willing to say so. Some of these polls indicate that even a majority of self-described liberals now admit that the media is biased junk. And there's no mystery as to the nature of that bias.
In all likelihood, this election cycle will be the last in which the conventional news media has a dominant role in "reporting" and shaping the outcome. The media's credibility and prestige have been eroding for 25 or more years. But few foresaw the stunning speed of collapse we're now watching.
What concerns me is the supportive relationship between our so-called mainstream media (no longer mainstream in truth) and the Democratic Party, and its parallel in the Soviet Union where Pravda and Isvestia provided propaganda support for the Communist Party. The American mass-media; specifically CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC and CNN, have become extensions of the Democratic Party just as Soviet mass-media was an extension of the Communist Party; and they have become equally skillful masters of propaganda.
Ronald (above)is exactly right. If Obama wins and the "fairness" doctrine is reinstituted, the press will be the propaganda arm of the party.
The real danger will come if Obama attempts to prosecute Bush administration officials for war crimes, thereby criminalizing political differences. The mainstream press will undoubtedly support this. The difference between the US in 2009 and the Soviet Union in 1939 will then be small.
The culture war can be viewed in many ways, and various metaphors can be used; but at the deepest moral and psychological level what we have is not so much red vs. blue or conservative vs. liberal; what we have is Thomas Jefferson vs. Karl Marx.
There is a broad sense that the MSM is becoming irrelevant. Insiders sense it and they're looking for something to turn the trend around. If Obama is elected, they will take credit for it. So to them, they look to Obama as the savior not of the country that they care little of, but of the industry they themselves destroyed. If they can tip the scales, they believe, they will show that their doctrinaire support for a failed ideology does in fact have relevance and once the masses are made to see this, they will return in droves to lap up the MSM drivel once again.
I'm not sure it is or will be as bad as that. OTOH, Russian friends have pointed out the creepy similarities. We got here by the decades of rising media pretensions: they're a profession, they're a priesthood, they're a fourth branch of government, they're not "reporting" but "advocating." The rise of television and decline of newspaper competition created a false media aura of oracular infallibility.
It doesn't matter who wins the election: their circulations, viewership, and credibility are imploding. Voters know the score.