How Dan Rather And Media's Kings Lost Their Crowns

Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big. But it was more than a loss. It was an abdication of authority.

Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did so by choosing to go into overt opposition to one party's candidate, a sitting president. It stooped to conquer... National Guard... Abu Ghraib... war in Iraq....

Authority can be a function of raw power, but among free people it is sustained by esteem and trust. Should esteem and trust falter, the public will start to contest an institution's authority....

Gallup reported that public belief in the media's ability to report news accurately and fairly had fallen to 44% -- what Gallup called a significant drop from 54% just a year ago....

This was the election that brought the reality of the Information Age to politics, not just the promise... TV commercials, canned phone calls, Internet ads, Web logs, partisan 527s, talk radio and of course cable news....

Pew Research Center reports that over three years from January 2000, the percentage of people getting candidate and campaign news fell 9% for daily newspapers, 10% for network news and 5% for news magazines....

"Wired Americans are more aware than non-Internet users of all kinds of arguments," Pew concluded, "even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions."

Maybe the networks and big dailies should try spinning in both directions.... Rather than be spun by large, faceless networks and newspapers, people... want something more akin to a political conversation with the spinners operating Web sites....

The future of information is that we'll have to determine it for ourselves -- and not simply accept it as inviolable authority. That emerging scenario gives great advantage to those who can determine credible and reliable sources rather than blindly accepting anyone just because they say so and behave like self-important, authoritative people. It's always been that way but just becoming more apparent.

Bigotry and hate is bigotry and hate -- and not that it is okay because it is "new and improved" liberal bigotry and hate. That is the nature of bigotry and hate -- that it always thinks it is some superior form of thinking. The curious development that became manifest with the recent election was that "liberal" had become provincial and reactionary -- while the so-called conservative position was actually the more tolerant and open-minded. For that reason, many who in the past had been the leadership of progressive thinking in America, became "conservatives" or supported the Republicans.

Meanwhile, the leftist groups attempted to hijack the Democratic party that became merely a lynch mob. That can happen even to the most educated people and in fact, they may be even more vulnerable these days because the learning being done in academic institutions advances learning the generalization over the specifics. That is, one is taught the conclusion before one begins any systematic inquiry into how it is we know what we think we know.

Once we have a conclusion, we can create any facts, statistics, polls and studies to prove what we want to believe. This is ultimately the failing of our education process from the earliest days in which vulnerable young minds are commanded to stand at the blackboard and write a hundred times, "Teachers deserve more pay and should be worshipped as supreme beings." Many never overcome those early years of indoctrination and grow up to be fawning Ph.D. students who are thought to further grovel and worship in the presence of self-aggrandizing authorities.

That game seems to be over.

Twelve days before the election, James Carville stood in a Beverly Hills living room surrounded by two generations of Hollywood stars. After being introduced by Sen. John Kerry’s daughter, Alexandra, he told the room — confidently, almost cockily — that the election was in the bag.

“If we can’t win this damn election,” the advisor to the Kerry campaign said, “with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55% of the country believing we’re heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs — if we can’t win this one, then we can’t win shit!”
ROFLMAO!
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