MSM's hold is dying.....I can see it....
Posted on 11/20/2004 9:40:16 AM PST by Congressman Billybob
Like Confederate General Jubal T. Early, I make occasional raids into Washington, D.C. The raid this week included a visit with some of my children and grandchildren, meeting Judge Robert Bork, and assorted other pleasures. But the most telling moment of the trip came in a deserted corridor of Reagan National Airport on Sunday morning. Then and there I understood the mechanical voices of the MSM (Mainstream Media).
It was a politico-religious experience, a secular epiphany, if you will.
I took a wrong turn and wound up in an empty hallway. There were moving walkways on both sides, but they were out of service and marked off with orange cones. Still, every five seconds a female mechanical voice said urgently, “Caution! Moving walkways are ending!”
In that moment I suddenly understood a talk show I’d seen an hour before, starring Chris Matthews, Andrew Sullivan and Sam Donaldson, among others. (I’m not picking on these gentlemen. Most other talking heads – with or without bad hairpieces – would have filled the bill.)
I realized there is no significant difference between these “live” talkers on the MSM, and that disembodied voice in that empty airport hallway. Before the election the MSM thought the Democrats might win. After the election, when the Republicans had won, the underlying message did not change. In thousands of words the talking heads of the MSM are repeating, ad nauseam, the same seven word message. It is:
“Caution! Republicans are bad! Democrats are good!”
Try this experiment for yourselves. Pick any talking head show. Choose any MSM print outlet; the New York Times will do nicely, thank you. Take whatever apparent story they’re talking about, and boil it down like Vermont maple syrup in the fall. When you reduce the story to its essence, beneath the level of the apparent facts of the day, see whether any political story in the MSM has any core message other than the “Caution!...”?
Bias is usually subtle. Pay attention to the verbs. I read a story right after the election on the thousands of state legislative races. The article consistently referred to seats “won” by Democrats, but seats “claimed” by Republicans. Is it any surprise that the reporters writing that were primarily Democrats? Or, pay attention to the adjectives. Others have researched to a fare-thee-well the respective use of “left-wing” and “right-wing.” Republicans often get the second label; Democrats seldom get the first one.
Are there more right-wingers than left-wingers in American politics? Check out the websites of the Congressional Black Caucus, or of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, or of almost any union (but especially the National Education Association). See if you conclude that the left wing is alive and well. Its label disappears because the MSM reporters don’t perceive the left as being “left-wing.”
When the MSM had a monopoly, facts they chose not to report simply did not exist. The monopoly has ended. Facts get reported in the alternative media. The MSM no longer controls the agenda; it can only embarrass itself by pretending that it still does.
TV requires, of course, more than just words. There has to be something to point a camera at, the apparently live and sentient pundits sitting in their chairs. But is that any more than window dressing? Does that make the content of the political shows any more substantial than that mechanical voice in the airport?
The MSM are dying by degrees in the quarterly Arbitron reports on audience shares. The MSM are dying because they insist on producing vacuous bias in their political coverage. This task will be unsettling, but I recommend it. Read the MSM, listen to them, watch them with more care than they think “dumb” Americans can bring to the task. See if you reach the same conclusion, that you’re hearing repetitive, mechanical voices from the MSM.
When the voices are clearly mechanical, they may be annoying but they seem less threatening. The true menace comes from voices which present the illusion of being real. Think of Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and the Hal 9000. Don’t the first three need the same cure as Hal got in the movie, 2001? Don’t they need to be deprogrammed, back to a time before they learned to lie, or worse, learned to believe their own lies?
Don’t they all need to go back to Urbana, Illinois, in 1992? Shouldn’t they all be asked to sing us a song before they fall silent? “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true ....”
Excellent! Thanks for composing this and for sharing it with us.
Well done! Thanks!
Great comparison ... and exactly the reason that I seldom have my tv on any more except to watch sports or check on the weather.
Open the pod door Hal.
great job, Congressman. You have nailed it!
Pretty good. And thanks for the ping kay.
How do you feel, Hal? "Dave? Dave???"
5.56mm
MSM's hold is dying.....I can see it....
Boils down to the essence. Good one.
Here is one about some Democrats who want Bush to ban trash shipments from Canada. Here is one about a bill a Democrat introduced. Here is one about a Democrat who put out a press release. I looked on the AP site. There are no comparable stories about congressional Republicans, even though they have majorities in both houses and can, unlike the Democrats, actually pass bills. It's as if no one bothered to tell the AP reporters that the Democrats don't run the show anymore. Like your mechanical voice in the airport, they just keep cranking out those "here's what's happening in Washington" stories entirely from the perspective of the Democratic Party. One wonders whether the AP reporters have even one Republican Senator or Representative in their Rolodexes. |
I remember that show - for the record it was The Chris Matthews Show,and the other two talking heads were Gloria Borger and Campbell Brown. But you're right, it doesn't really matter which pundits are filling the seats at any given time.
I saw this show while flipping through, and all I could think was that this sight, five liberals sitting in a television studio wailing about the evils to be wrought on our "democracy" by the Republican Party, perfectly demonstrates what the "news media" has become.
They sit in their Manhattan or DC studios or newsrooms, calling 61 million Americans stupid, bigoted, easily-misled rubes, peddling (with a wink and a nod) outlandish conspiracy theories about how Karl Rove manipulated vote totals in Florida and Ohio (after hooking up with Osama bin Laden to produce a videotape that was the sole reason for John Kerry's defeat), and just generally throwing a big kicking and screaming temper tantrum like a spoiled 3-year-old who's just been told by Mommy that she's not buying that toy.
In the mean time, they're either ignoring, or they haven't noticed, that their readership and viewership is abandoning them in droves, that more and more people are recognizing their blatant left-wing bias, that journalism is one of the most hated professions in America today.
I think you're right - it's just about time to pull the plug on them and start over.
What are the chances that the ratings will prompt shake-ups? After all, corporations own networks.
And you'll never see those stories there, because Republicans don't ever do "wonderful" things in Congress, according to the AP. All Republicans do is "scheme", and "plot", and "hurl insults", and "cozy up to special interests", and "curtail our freedoms."
And why should they bother calling up Republican Representatives or Senators? Everything they need to know about them they can get from the Democrats.
Fun! I think your right, it's almost a mantra. I like to play it as a game - hear that a story's coming up, and then we try to guess the angle...
Like, how can they possibly turn "Mt. St. Helens" into a "Bush Bad" story?
great! 'cept i like to call the MSM the Old media.. or almost dead media.. just to tork 'em.
and you forgot Bill Moyers.. socialist grandaddy of them all... with Public financing even.. meaning PBS.
i tend to think they are more dangerous then we think.. and more sinister.. i believe they are rousing the masses much as Lenin did .. feeding the hate. but maybe i'm way too suspicious..
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I have been watching with some amusement the flurry of stories from the Associated Press telling us about all the wonderful things that Democrats are doing in the Congress.