Posted on 09/23/2004 5:20:54 PM PDT by Vision Thing
Are the media having a nervous breakdown?
The Dan Rather affair looks like yet another giant freakout in the patient's collapse. For Rather and CBS, all the conflicting tensions that torture journalists and producers day and night came together. The broiling partisan heat, the pressure to get out of third place with a scoop, the hot breath of cable news, the race to beat all the hacks and scribes who keep nibbling away at the story (your story, the story you've spent five years trying to get right), the baying of the bloggers, the sick sense of always being news-managed by the White House's black arts, the longing to show the Web charlatans and cable-heads that rumpled-trenchcoat news is still where the action is, the pounding inner soundtrack that asks: Am I a watchdog or a poodle? A journalist or an entertainer? A tough newsman or a mouse with mousse?
(snip)
Fear of missing the bandwagon is behind all the hype about the brilliance of bloggers who blew the whistle. You'd think "Buckhead," who first spotted the flaws in the documents, is the cyberworld's Woodward and Bernstein. Now the conventional wisdom is that the media will be kept honest and decent by an army of incorruptible amateur gumshoes. In fact, cyberspace is populated by a coalition of political obsessives and pundits on speed who get it wrong as much as they get it right. It's just that they type so much they are bound to nail a story from time to time.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
LOL
Woodward and Bernstein couldn't break a story today if their lives depended on it.
And they want to make darned sure that no one is ever perceived as breaking a story bigger than theirs.
It's too late, of course, but the leftists will continue to denigrate Free Republic and bloggers because they know their monopoly is just about over.
They are afraid...very afraid of the internet and the freedom, research capability, and threat that it represent to them and what they consider to be their carefully gaurded and well kept palace.
I have never met FreePer Buckhead, but I will bet he doesn't get things wrong as much as he gets it right.
Oh, yeah....and where are the STATISTICS to back up THAT statement!!! Bet we get news right more often than the MSM!!!
What a horse's ass Tina Brown is. Every day these people prove Bernie Goldberg to be absolutely correct in all of his charges.
What they really don't like is the audience OBSERVING them and answering BACK.
They have to be on a podium insulated from the lowly peasants, who are being lectured to and at.
I would dangle more participles but must return to the laundry. Fresh jammies.
Now, go find another magazine you can play with and tear its wings off.
In this opinion piece by Tina Brown, she equates new media to the startups of the Internet-bubble era, and the old media to the staid, stately conglomerate companies. She doesn't exactly say it, but I think she's hoping the new media will suffer the same fate as the Internet startups.
Hmmm... I always thought of Bush as more of a Griffindor type...
Car-ville would make a great Lord Voldemart, donchathink?
The MSM gets so MUCH wrong, and they have MUCH MORE resources to do it with.
Makes you wonder just how Tina (and everyone) just knows this? And why, post-Clinton, it should make any difference to them?
I think what really has TBs undies in a twist is the fact that they are edumacated journos, and bloggers in pajamas are just run of the mill dummies, who happened to break open and unravel the biggest story of campaign 2004, and bring downone of the most pompous-@ssed newshack in the business.
She does have it right when she calls Burkett a whacko, though.
Fierce, nimble competition always makes the slow, cumbersome incumbents nervous.
Especially the truth. This is why the MSM cannot be trusted.
Documents or no documents, everyone knows Bush's dad got him out of Vietnam. Everyone knows he thought he had better, funner things to do than go to a bunch of boring National Guard drills.
Proof! They don't need proof! They've told this lie long enough that everyone believes it. Why did CBS think they needed documents to prove it?
Not everyone drinks the Kool-Aid Nina. The Internet has a voice that can expose your lies.
Must suck to watch the millions of dollars flushed down the toilet on your brilliant creation, the now-defunct "Talk" magazine.
I said all along this media attention was not good.
Sooner or later, McCain will come up with a new law to protect the people and the media conglomerates in the guise of security, and we'll all be getting audited by the next Democratic President.
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