"Rightest warriors". And proud of it.
"But it's hard enough to get the story right, without holding it hostage to an open-ended negotiation with zealots who believe they already know what the story is."
The leftist zealots in the press have been doing this for years unchecked.
Translation in Kerryspeak: "How dare you commoners question what we tell you?"
Great post. Journalists are beginning to whine. "WAAAAAHHH....WWWAAAAHHH.... I'm being forced to be truthful and balanced". Thank God for computers and the internet. Liberal lies and liars are being spotted and counterattacked almost instantly.
Absolutely, if you insist on using words like "carnage".
This sounds like a buggy whip maker bemoaning that new fangled horseless carriage Mr. Ford was pimping.
Total blather.
I am a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (in the late 1970s), and while there I was amazed at the extent to which the students and faculty parroted the conventional wisdom of the media (at the time, the students all seemed to believe that Ayatolla Khomenei was a would-be Jeffersonian Democrat who would bring a new era of peace to the world).
This columnist can be pinioned by his own example. Why would the softball game be part of the news? Why wouldn't it be news? Herbert Gans wrote a book called "Deciding what's News", but it really doesn't begin to answer the question. The fact is, the mainstream media (and all other media, for that matter) decide what's news by instinctive feel within very general guidelines.
This journalist wants to be one of the high priests in the temple, making decisions that no mere commoner can fathom. The fact is, this kind of failed elitism is what has brought the mainstream media to the state they are in today.
I don't believe that the bloggers whom he refers to are right-wing as much as they are appalled by the important information that does not get reported, and by the way that other stories are portrayed. They started as a reaction to the failures of the media to cover stories from a fair and balanced perspective. As the mainstream media, led, I believe, by Pinch Sulzberger's New York Times, dug in their heels, the bloggers have discovered that they can function as a source of news themselves.
Moreover, where Free Republic stands head and shoulders over even the best of the webloggers, is that it has a democratic self-correcting mechanism -- the threads. People here have a real instinct for what is news. When an article is posted, other FReepers will read it carefully for bias and comment on any unfair word usage, prejudiced selection of information or other spin. If there is an outright inaccuracy in the article, FReepers will jump all over it to correct the mistakes. What we are doing here is a transparent collection and dissemination of the news in real time.
It is the failure of the mainstream media to recognize their own biases, coupled with the availability of alternative sources of news (and interactive participation) in weblogs and Free Republic, that is killing the media. Today, even if the media were to turn overnight into a fair and balanced vehicle, I think it is too late. By their failures, they have created a viable alternative to their closed system, and information flow will never be the same.
That's not newsworthy? It's only an "offsetting story" to placate the "rightist warriors"?
Americans liberating Iraqis IS the story. The fixation on "carnage" is background noise.
Oh, quit the dramatics. CNN admitted that they spiked the truth about atrocities in Iraq. Thus, they didn't report the story anyway! I mean how hard was that? And, one more time, the consumers understand that there is no need to trust the MSM anymore since the MSM spins the truth or suppresses it to favor the Democrats. So you can just do as the great Mama T advises - "Shove it."
Where's the BARF ALERT?
Until they wake up they wil continue their march towards irrelevance.
If that were only the case
but a daily bargaining session with an increasingly factionalized public
Bargaining? It should come down to which side can provide the facts to support their assertions, and not relying on the lies of ommission to make one's point.
What a pantload.
I won't be satisfied until newsrooms are under siege from heavy weaponry.
Awwww. Maybe we should send him some cheese to go with his whine...
It feels so good to see Old Media squirm as it dies a slow, painful and well-deserved death...
How easily he excuses the bias that has been the cause of the awakening of the masses to the bald face distortions and slanted reporting of the anti-American communist news agencies.
That segment of zealots contains the majority of main stream Americans who have switched to Fox News to sop up slivers of fair reporting.
It is the minority of zealots, that dare to claim majority status, that makes up the major news networks that hate patriotism, nationalism, and the American culture. Their day is ending, and one cannot help but take pleasure at their discomfort.
"a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors"
This seems to be a step up from right-wing extremists, being a warrior is a good thing, no? Especially when one is right.
Once again the Left demonstrates that it expects a complete, unchallenged monopoly or it will whine about how unfair life is.