Hugh Hewitt On John Carroll, The Dog Trainer And The Demise Of The Old Media (MUST READ!!!)

HughHewitt.com ^ | 09/13/04 | Hugh Hewitt

[goldstategop]

The Old Media is awaiting its demise. At the Dog Trainer they're still in denial. John Carroll can sneer at FOX NEWS all he wants but what's behind the explosive growth of the New Media led by Rupert Murdoch's upstart network and the blogosphere on the Internet is quite simply a loss of trust in the established product. This loss of trust is fed not only by partisanship, but a contempt for readers and viewers bred as a result of institutional inertia, dishonesty, and plain laziness. The amateurs are running rings around the pros of the Old Media. Yes, to recall an old expression, the head of the fish is rotting down. In other words, the monopoly position of being the gatekeeper of what is and is what isn't news has come tumbling down like the Berlin Wall. Carroll and Rather and the rest of the Old Media warhorses don't get it yet but their coverup will hurt them more in the long run than in trying to admit they got it wrong and cleaning house for the sake of the profession. Hugh's account of this development is a long one but it brings into focus who the winners and losers of the 21st Century's press are.

[Republic Rocker]

The LA TIMES is such a piece of garbage.....I wish I could subscribe again so that I could feel that satisfaction of canceling again!

[Jeff Chandler]

John Carroll? He sounds more like Lewis Carroll.

[Mach9]

There is no profession, in the old sense, among ANY of the professions. Teacher? Lawyer? Judge? Doctor? Statesman? All have been corrupted to some degree. Professions can't have or recognize ethics if their practioners have no ethics.

[rimmont]

John Carroll should know a lot about "pseudo-journalism". It's his business.

[Mike Fieschko]

*"Here is something else I’ve come to realize: The looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there’s informality and humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity."

That's IT!!!

They had transgressed the unwritten law. Cue Monty Python:

Rogers: I've been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor.

Stig: No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me.

Rogers: But the police have film of Dinsdale actually nailing your head to the floor.

Stig: (pause) Oh yeah, he did that.

Rogers: Why?

Stig: Well he had to, didn't he? I mean there was nothing else he could do, be fair. I had transgressed the unwritten law.

Rogers: What had you done?

Stig: Er... well he didn't tell me that, but he gave me his word that it was the case, and that's good enough for me with old Dinsy. I mean, he didn't *want* to nail my head to the floor. I had to insist. He wanted to let me off. He'd do anything for you, Dinsdale would.

[jnarcus]

Ah John Carroll maybe sober now but my god the man was a raving lunatic years ago when he was drinking....I think some of those black outs must have killed off too many brain cells

[Christian4Bush]

Hewitt BUMP

[dvwjr]

Who ever considered "journalism" to be a profession? Professions are medicine, engineering, science, law.

How the hell did 'journalism' ever get to be described as a 'profession' except by journalists themselves. They are tradesmen, not a dis-honorable job description, no more so than someone (like one of my grandfathers) who worked in the construction business.

Some might call it snobbery, but while journalists may describe some of their more illustrious peers as being quite 'professional', the media business is not a profession in the true sense of the word. They are a trade which has members of widely varying education, skills and abilities. They have no formal codes and regulations which allow those members of true professions to be recognized and held legally responsible by the general public for their actions. The free 'press' was never meant to have such enforcement strictures and is accountable to none but the profession of the law and to the favor of its consuming public.


dvwjr

[DaveMSmith]

John Kerry is a product of Old Media. Never in career were any of his stories ever questioned. He was one of them - his words were printed and broadcast unfiltered. Magic Hat, Nixon president in 1968 only serve to illustrate. Kerry's politics matched his paper's reporting and he learned early that he could say whatever popped into his head and get away with it.

President Bush is always filtered on the broadcast networks and CNN... with the same loathing and contempt evidenced here. No respect, only hatred.

Fair? President Bush is an amazing President. He has had to deal with personal criticism that's unimaginable. He's a stong leader who I trust. Heaven knows the opposition watches his every move.

During the RNC convention, Larry King interviewed President Bush 41, his son (not Neil or Jeb.. the other) and his son.. he looked about 13. Larry King asked the young man if the things they say about his uncle bother him. He said "oh no, it's all part of the game'... I thought Larry and 41 were going to fall out of their seats! They quickly changed the subject.

Is it all really theater to manage their beliefs? Is it that deliberate and if so, is there someone someplace writing the script? Can someone like George Soros play with currency markets and the message on the news and profit? Is there a cabal of media giants who control left politics? Or are they united by their greed and hatred?

[backhoe]

-60 Minutes to Infamy- those forged memos and The Shot Heard Round the World--

[The Real Eddie01]

Groupthink defined:

A negative relational outcome of group decision making characterized by a group's failure to think critically about its decisions.

Symptoms of Groupthink:

The group overestimates its power and morality
The group becomes closed-minded
Group members experience pressure to conform

- Hmmm, sound like anyone you know?

[ADemocratNoMore]

Please allow me to get a little off topic here, but in talking about The War of the Worlds, Carol says "Their voices quavered with dread, a sound they had learned by listening to tapes of the Hindenburg airship disaster from the previous year."

What Mr. Carol fails to realize is that magnetic tape as a sound recording and reproduction media did not exist in the States until after WWII, having been invented by the Germans sometime in the early 1940's. Herbert Morrison, the reporter who was forever immortalized describing the immolation of the Hindenburg recorded the event on a portable phonograph cutting lathe made by the Presto company and any reporters who learned their craft did so by listening to copies of the recording on other phonograph records.

Likewise, I've noticed more than a few people talking about John Kerry shooting VIDEO during his 4 months in Vietnam!. Close, but back then he used a movie camera. Similar results were produced by different, (and now forgotten), technologies.

There is a reason some people call a remote control a "clicker" and some still say "dial the phone, and, although a typewriter and a word processing program will both put text on paper it appears that somebody forgot that they do it differently.

[okie01]

Who ever considered "journalism" to be a profession? Professions are medicine, engineering, science, law.

My recollection is that, when reporting was still considered a "craft", it was more honest...

[singfreedom]

This Carroll fella has done more double talk in these few statements than a sane person could shake a stick at! He has contradicted himself: first calling his "profession" loose and unstructured, then he says they have a "strictly enforced code", albeit "unwritten".

If this is what American citizens are expected to read, watch, or listen to, in the interest of being "informed", we are in deep horsesh*t! These folks can't even formulate a cohesive, decently written argument, let alone state facts! Heaven help us if this is what we have to depend on for news. Thankfully, NOT!

[Enduring Freedom]

Ra^ther Pa^thetic

[Weirdad]

Great article by Hewitt. I can't believe that I am about to write this much at this time of night but this is a historical time and I think that some analogies should be added that expand on the causes of the demise of the Mainstream Media (MSM) about which Carroll is clueless. I did not want to post a vanity, but if you like this feel free to post it for me or link to it from other related threads!;-)

-----

Diseased Market, Healthy Market: 
The Mainstream Media contrasted with the New Media

By Weirdad, 9/14/2004

We all know about the distortion in Free Markets caused by excess government intervention. When the "invisible hand" of the free market is blocked the wrong things happen.

The Mainstream Media's relationship with a free market for news has become diseased and incongruent, distorting the product-customer relationship; The new "informal" media (blogs, the web, etc.) has a healthy and congruent relationship to free markets which makes it revolutionary.

The diseased state of the mainstream media is exemplified ironically by Carroll's self-incriminating statement, "All across America, there are offices that resemble newsrooms, and in those offices there are people who resemble journalists, but they are not engaged in journalism. It is not journalism because it does not regard the reader – or, in the case of broadcasting, the listener, or the viewer – as a master to be served." If the customer is not always right then you do not have a free market!

Carroll thought he was indicting the informal pajama media, but Hewitt could have written the exact same thing to indict Carroll and the Mainstream Media itself!

Going from abstract to concrete, here are three examples of diseased Free Markets:

(1) The American Medical Association exists to serve its membership and its members dreams for medicine. But some time ago it created what has become an annually mutating language called "CPT Codes" which through a fascist agreement with government and industry is required if physicians want to "speak" to government and insurance companies about any medical procedures that are billed. Rent-a-language! And even though AMA's codes are required by government, the AMA "owns" the "copyright" on the codes, and annually sells so many licenses for use of the mandated codes that the AMA no longer has to depend on income from its members' dues. As such, the question becomes, "Who are the customers of the AMA?" When the answer is not "its members" then you find that the members are no longer served. And in fact they are being served up! If the members are not the customers, then what are they? The PRODUCT! The AMA is now in the business of selling a captive collection of physicians to insurance and the government, while the sleeping physicians continue to be duped into thinking that they are the customers. And the same thing happens in the Mainstream media.

(2) The American public, whether watching free broadcast television or paying for cable, is narcotized into believing it is the customer of the television stations and networks. Of course this is only a delusion, an opiate of the people, because in fact, the American Public is the very PRODUCT the networks and stations sell to advertisers. The media only has to keep the masses sedated enough so that they can be fattened and served to the advertisers. They feed us, their livestock, only as much truth as is required to keep us from waking up to the real world and running off. Entertainment and "the news" hypnotizes us for market. And not only advertisers buy us. We are also sold to the politicians and the media's friends and the self-centered whims of the newspeople and to whoever or whatever provide the most self-esteem, back rubbing and warm fuzzies for the "professional journalists."

(3) The Print Media has the same disease. How many newspapers are out there which are financed by subscriptions? Basically zero. Newspapers are not financed by subscriptions but by advertising. Who is the customer? The advertisers. And what is the product? The readers. The readers are sold to the advertisers. And like TV viewers, many readers are duped into believing that they are the customers, when in fact they are just the PRODUCT being sold. The newspapers include just enough truth and value to keep their fattened audience penned up waiting for market.

It's a Free Republic and the media can do what it wants, but we all can choose whether to be products or customers. It is only when we the readers, and we the viewers, and we the listeners are paying for what we get that market pressures align fully with our needs and wants. It is only when our news sources don't have a built-in conflict of interest with us that the Media works for us as customers instead of selling us as products. And now a revolution is enabling us able to bear the cost of paying for news without selling ourselves into slavery.

Just as the industrial revolution brought made new and efficient commodities practical for the masses, the information revolution has made news a commodity that can be produced inexpensively. This new commodity is produced in a superior decentralized system that cannot be controlled or distorted by a few people. And the new commodities can be financed inexpensively--sometimes the payment is just the fun and fulfillment of having a voice.

As we readers and watchers and listeners "pay" our own way, we once again become customers and not products. Is it any wonder that the MSM is withering away? When you have an automobile in your garage, you no longer need steamships and railroads for basic day to day transportation. We might at times need an airplane or a semi-truck, and if the mainstream media can provide that kind of heavy lifting then we might become their customer or maybe even their product, but only if they regard us as "a master to be served."

The days of We the People needing the mainstream media for basic transportation are coming to an end. We are regaining a healthy and congruent marketplace for news. We are leaving the steamships to rust, and we are gathering together in places like Free Republic to help each other to drive our own cars wherever we want to go.

 

[wildandcrazyrussian]

Excellent points!

I had never heard of the example you provided of the AMA's diagnostic codes. It is certainly true about the economic calculations regarding how newspapers exist, and why it is so difficult to just start a competing conservative newspaper (primarily because, as I know from experience on a student newspaper in a left-wing area, the potential advertisers are afraid to have their name being seen by the vindictive left-wing (sorry for the redundancy) newspaper on the pages of a competing newspaper.

[Weirdad]

"Sorry for the redundancy." <--- Forgiven.

But you can start it on line a lot less expensively. The fact that business are afraid of the left wing can be your first story.

[wildandcrazyrussian]

That is certainly true now, but I neglected to mention this was late 1960's in Boston before the DARPA Internet project was even begun in 1969. (Hey that was about back when Al Gore's mother was singing him that union song in the cradle!)