Posted on 01/10/2006 9:50:14 PM PST by nickcarraway
QUESTION: One of the things we've seen this year is the reduction in your approval ratings. And I know how you feel about polls, but it appears to be taking something out of your political clout, as evidenced by the Patriot Act vote.
What do you attribute your lowered polls to? And are you worried that independents are losing confidence in your leadership?
The question above gets my vote for the single most obnoxious utterance of the major media last year. The CNN transcript transcript of the press conference President Bush held on December 19 does not identify the questioner. In the President's astonishingly restrained and polite answer, he addresses his interlocutor as "David," so I assume it was David Gregory of NBC.
The press did some truly awful things last year. The flying falsehoods in the reporting on hurricane Katrina. The spill-the-secrets betrayals of the New York Times' stories on CIA airplane flights to foreign holding centers. The mythic "outing" of Valerie Plame. And the relentless ongoing negativity of the coverage from Iraq.
But the concentrated blank-faced hypocrisy of those four sentences from Gregory takes the prize.
Let's imagine that President Bush could have answered that question the way it deserved.
"Oh, I don't know, Stretch. I suppose when the greatest image- and opinion-making machine the world has ever seen devotes five years to making me look bad, it might have some effect."
STORIED NEWSPAPERMAN BEN HECHT, in his out-of-print autobio, A Child of the Century, told how he and a photographer from a Chicago newspaper made news when there wasn't much of anything happening for real. They went to the shores of Lake Michigan, dug a jagged ditch, took a picture, and wrote up a story about an earthquake. Then they went out and filled up the ditch. It worked so well and created such a furor that they did it again.
That was back in the Roaring Twenties, and it was all quite innocent. Hecht and his photographer didn't bear anybody any ill will. They just wanted to stir up some excitement and have some laughs.
By contrast, I visited my sister a few years back and was struck by reading the Washington Post in person and on paper. Far more evident than on the web, the newsprint Post struck me as, well, sick. The Post created news, too, just like Ben Hecht, but it did so self-righteously, as a matter of policy -- not just some reporter's prank. For example, one day while I was in Virginia, the paper ran a front-page story about something, maybe it was radon contamination in Maryland schools. And then the next day, it ran a story based on results of a poll -- its own -- testing how upset Marylanders were about radon contamination in the schools.
The Washington Post, in other words, felt perfectly justified in trying to run a local school board.
I'VE BEEN AROUND NEWSPAPERS all my life -- they're a family business, in a humble way. I go back long before the word "media" came to be applied to the news business. I've never had any illusions about the elevated virtues of news reporting. My Dad, who took to the advertising side of the business, made it very clear to me that newspapering was "writing on the backs of advertisements," as George Bernard Shaw once described it. If you don't sell enough space, the reporters don't get room to write. And papers do display favoritism. My first editor was a bigshot in the Lion's Club. The Lion's Club got a lot of ink. Big deal.
I have seen newspapers go through two big, wrenching transformations. Today, we take for granted that newspapers print lovely color pictures and tight, sharp type. That's a product of the first transformation, a technical one, from letterpress printing to offset. In letterpress, ink is applied to a raised lead surface and applied to paper by presses as big and heavy as locomotives. In offset, a mixture of ink and water is applied to a far more delicate engraved surface, then transferred to a rubber blanket, thence applied to paper.
That change, an enormously expensive one involving a big new capital investment, drove marginal newspapers out of business in the late '50s and early '60s.
The second transforming influence came from national TV network news. When the latest news could be obtained from the tube at dinner time, the afternoon daily paper became obsolete. Seemingly overnight, cities with two newspapers were reduced to one, and big cities with half a dozen or more papers fell to three or two or one.
TODAY, THE CONVERGENCE AND TRANSFORMATION has grown more complicated. Watergate started it all, giving newspapers a shot of arrogance from which they have never recovered. Then came the Internet and Clinton and talk radio at about the same time. The major media took sides, and the Internet and radio fought back.
Major news media today has become an image-making enterprise, much more like the advertising agencies of classic Madison Avenue in the 1950s. And, just as with old-time Madison Avenue, people tell pollsters they don't trust reporters – "the media," as it is said now.
I used to watch cable TV news shows during the Clinton impeachment and think, "Can't people see what's going on?" Of course, people did, and people do, and major media nowadays, while not quite in its death throes -- it still controls the national hearthbeat [STET!], television -- is obviously fighting a desperate rearguard battle.
There may, indeed, come a media Waterloo, the ultimate convergence of declining TV news viewership, splintering audiences scattered across too many channels, and falling newspaper circulation and ad revenues. It may have begun already, in the coverage of the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito (I write this over the weekend of January 7-8.) It should offer myriad opportunities for over-the-top outrage.
Because, in response to today's multi-element convergence, the media has not responded rationally. Offset printing was a technical revolution, resulting in capital re-investment. Television caused print consolidation. Today's competition, more like a death of a thousand cuts, has seen the media retreat into siege-like ideological solidarity. That just can't work, especially as the news product gets ever more predictable, and -- face it -- ever more dull.
The old fashioned "news triangle" was "facts -- interest -- readers" -- facts of interest to your readers. If you ignore facts, and the readers aren't interested anymore, there's simply nowhere to go.
Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover, Massachusetts.
I like his take on the MSM bias. The fact remains that the influence of the dinosaur media lessens each year. The good news is that they still don't realize this because they live in a bubble. Hence, our vote is flawed instead of accurate, and the nation is ill-informed instead of more rounded than they are given credit for being.
There is someplace to go. Start writing fiction, and try to sell that instead of masquerading fiction as news. Maybe the readers will be interested in fiction . Readers are NOT interested in fiction that pretends to be news. Its also dishonest, and propagandaic nonsense.
I believe that spin news writing is a curse on the republic. Dan Blather is a case in point.
A blogger will do them and report the results to his audience, who will have funded the effort.
A good example is the Iraq "embedding" that Bill Roggio undertook a month-or-so ago -- which the Washington Post proceeded to misreport.
Roggio had an invitation to go to Iraq, but needed a.) credentials (which he obtained from the Weekly Standard, as I recall and b.) cash for travel and expenses, while taking a leave-of-absence from his regular job.
His readership raised $17K to fund the trip.
I'm thinking that, if we wanted to, say, fund a thorough and credible investigation of some enviromental rip-off, we could raise a respectable stipend right here on Free Republic.
FR already hosts some of the best researchers and investigative reporters in the universe...
Ping
Pray tell, how many bloggers get paid?
Roggio had an invitation to go to Iraq, but needed a.) credentials (which he obtained from the Weekly Standard, as I recall and b.) cash for travel and expenses, while taking a leave-of-absence from his regular job.
Oh, so he got cash from a publication! QED.
I'm thinking that, if we wanted to, say, fund a thorough and credible investigation of some enviromental rip-off, we could raise a respectable stipend right here on Free Republic.
Not from what I've seen. It took two years before a FReeper would even do a review.
if they had understood this they would have used a period typewriter for the bush ANG fake memo's and we MIGHT have kerry as president.
I imagine that in the future this will become more common. I would donate money to efforts such as this. The writer would have to have established himself as someone serious, and I would want to see a detailed proposal, rather than an open-ended vague promise to "investigate," but I think this is a real possibility for the blogosphere to establish credibility amongst the general public.
Let's hope, when history books are written in the future, the authors don't rely on MSM archives for their sources. What a long strange trip it's been.
I believe that the only possible hope for MSM outlets to survive the long term in the news business is to jettison the editorial and opinion sections completely, leaving those to people who are more qualified to comment on particular issues and who can do so without distorting basic news coverage.
I wonder what percentage of MSM workers would still be in the industry if there were no opportunity to pursue ideological goals in the reporting of news?
Excellent article nick; thanks for the ping Carry_Okie. And I associate myself with the remarks of okie01 and Miss Marple.I have seen newspapers go through two big, wrenching transformations. Today, we take for granted that newspapers print lovely color pictures and tight, sharp type. That's a product of the first transformation, a technical one, from letterpress printing to offset. In letterpress, ink is applied to a raised lead surface and applied to paper by presses as big and heavy as locomotives. In offset, a mixture of ink and water is applied to a far more delicate engraved surface, then transferred to a rubber blanket, thence applied to paper.
That change, an enormously expensive one involving a big new capital investment, drove marginal newspapers out of business in the late '50s and early '60s.
IOW, money that might have gone into good reporting and analysis went instead into production values - just like no party has nominated a bald-headed candidate for POTUS or VP (except Ford, who got to be POTUS without first being elected to national office) since the Eisenhower/Stevenson 1950s. Certainly a person with hair can be a fine POTUS - but it does no credit to the Republic that it now excludes from any consideration men who may have high qualifications but happen to be "folically challenged." Imagine being saddled with a President Edwards because of his hairstylist!! For that matter, might it no be that the narrow loss of Ford to Carter had to do with hairline??The second transforming influence came from national TV network news. When the latest news could be obtained from the tube at dinner time, the afternoon daily paper became obsolete. Seemingly overnight, cities with two newspapers were reduced to one, and big cities with half a dozen or more papers fell to three or two or one.
More production values stuff, primarily. The key thing to understand is that it rarely matters to the Republic whether you and I learn about something a day sooner or later. TV crowded out the evening newspaper because it was free and because it got you the news on a shorter deadline. But the medium also affects what is news; a TV cameraman loves a fire, for example. Or a weeping victim or survivor of a victim.Talk radio - which is simply journalism which does not claim to be objective, and therefore has less tendency to arrogance than "objective journalism" - has lower cost of production than TV. And the Internet has very small cost of production, which explains why you and I can make content for it. Broadcast journalism has been a powerful centralizing influence; the internet is a decentralizing influence which is why liberalism doesn't do well on it.
Ping.
bttt
Cub reporters functioning as stenographers for a powerful, disgruntled, manipulative FBI agent started the arrogance? Stunning.
Media bias bump.
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