Posted on 11/29/2009 2:15:34 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Michael Gerson has lousy timing. In The Washington Post, in one of those now familiar elegies for old media, he writes:
And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain.
That's laughably untrue in the Warmergate story. If you rely on the lavishly remunerated "climate correspondents" of the big newspapers and networks, you'll know nothing about the Climate Research Unit scandals - just the business-as-usual drivel about Boston being underwater by 2011. Indeed, even when a prominent media warm-monger addresses the issue, the newspaper prefers to reprint a month-old column predating the scandal. If you follow online analysis from obscure websites on the fringes of the map, you'll know what's going on. If you go to the convenience store and buy today's newspaper, you won't. That's the problem.
If anyone needs newspapers, it ought to be for stories like this. If there were no impending ecopalypse, then "climate science" would be a relatively obscure field, as it was up to a generation ago. Now it produces celebrity scientists living high off the hog of billions in grants. They thus have a vested interest in maintaining the planet's-gonna-fry line. So what do the media do? Instead of exposing the thesis to rigorous journalistic examination, they stage fluffy green stunts, run soft-focus "living green" features with Hollywood "activists", and at a time of massive staff cutbacks in every other department create the positions of specialist "climate correspondent" and "environmental reporter" and fill them with sycophantic promoters of the Big Scare to the point that, as Dr Mann coos approvingly to The New York Times, "you've taken the words out of my mouth".
What Gerson writes ought to be true. Warmergate demonstrates why it isn't.
The collusion of two pillars of failure, each with ZERO credibility at this point: Big Media looking out for Big Academia.
It’s Chapter 325 of a never-ending saga.
That statement is laughable on so many levels it isn't funny. The use of the word 'investigative' is a real side-splitter. 'Intellectual' applied to MSM stories is another hoot. If their "reporting" weren't so chuck full of BS there truly wouldn't be so much to comment on.
We’d be better off with a random selection of Cretans in congress instead of the cretins we have, though we wouldn’t understand what they are saying, as it will all be Greek to us.
I guess maybe that's true. I always thought it started when the media brought down Nixon; they started to get drunk on their own power right about that time. But that's maybe because Watergate happened when I was about 19, and everyone always thinks history started when they became aware of current events.
McCarthy was 20 years before Nixon. They got a taste of blood with McCarthy, that's for sure.
But before that, there was Teapot Dome.
The traditional media is abdicating it's role, and has been for a long time. But the new media is coming up from behind, and coming up rapidly. As long as the Constitution protects us, we'll be all right over the long run.
Those dang jourbalists. Just can’t trust em to get their story straight.
From now on, that's what I'm calling it.
Over 70 officers were injured, some very seriously. About 20 of the attackers were injured.
The AP wrote about how the police were massacring peaceful protesters while the Pope watched.
As I was at the event I knew they were lying though their capped teeth. And I never trusted the Media again.
“As good as this story is, the bigger story being missed by the press is how MSM is abdicating its role and becoming complicit in the kinds of sins it used to relish exposing.”
That happened a long time ago. I don’t know exactly when, but I became aware of it in the early 1980s, and have seen examples from the Viet Nam era. Ann Coulter wrote that the trashing of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s was an example of this.
Point is, it’s not that they are now abdicating; it is that they have been despicable villains for decades.
As for Coulter, she is dead on correct about McCarthy. The media was driven to villify him as part of their pro-Soviet agenda. They also had to villify Hoover too, and others. And they got LOTS of help from the KGB in doing it.
The same thing with the Vietnam War, the protest of which- and assault upon by the MSM was really financed from abroad through “pacifist” front groups that were set up by the Sovs and never had any problem co-opting reporters in America.
It’s pathetic how bad it has gotten. You have to be certifiable to believe ANYTHING that comes out of the DC MSM. There is simply no credibility there.
As another poster here has coined it... Climediagate.
There is some merit to this position. Some type of licensing agreements should probably be arranged. That said what is normally done with MSM articles? They're dissected and the truth and MSM mendacity is exposed. Frankly, they have become little more than subject matter for discussion rather than the purveyors of unknown information.
bump
Fixed it.
“The same thing with the Vietnam War, the protest of which- and assault upon by the MSM was really financed from abroad through “pacifist” front groups that were set up by the Sovs”
I have been trying for years to draw attention to the way the Soviets worked to exacerbate our drug problem, but I can’t get anybody to believe me.
“without the costly enterprise of newsgathering”
From what I understand, very little of that actually goes on among the lamestream media.
I have been trying for years to draw attention to the way the Soviets worked to exacerbate our drug problem, but I can’t get anybody to believe me.
People would rather believe that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross-dresser. It shows you how successful the KGB was at such things. Hey. They also invented Castro, and he invented Weather Underground killer Bernadine Dohrn, teaching her about revolutionary Marxism in the early 1970s and advising her to go back to the US and find a black communist who could present himself as suitable for the presidency and be able to shame white liberals into voting for him.
Not bad, huh?
Seems so doesn’t it. They seem to parrot whatever PR or the DNC tells them too.
A major newspaper like the NYT or WaPo could at least temporarily reverse its decline by taking this warmingate thing in its teeth and running loud an hard with it. But staying in existence is not what the “press” is interested in. Like NARAL or Planned Parenthood or NOW and so many other orgs the only purpose of the organization is the Revolution and Utopian Socialism. Once we have that gloriously in place the WaPo owners can retire in satisfaction that they have brought Salvation to Mankind or they feel they can continue on as the government mouthpiece after the Inet and the Washington Times are no more. WaPo is no different from the hundreds of little ACORN organizations or the hundreds of civil rights organizations.
I guess maybe that's true. I always thought it started when the media brought down Nixon; they started to get drunk on their own power right about that time. But that's maybe because Watergate happened when I was about 19, and everyone always thinks history started when they became aware of current events.That happened a long time ago. I don’t know exactly when, but I became aware of it in the early 1980s, and have seen examples from the Viet Nam era. Ann Coulter wrote that the trashing of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s was an example of this.
McCarthy was 20 years before Nixon. They got a taste of blood with McCarthy, that's for sure.
But before that, there was Teapot Dome.
The traditional media is abdicating it's role, and has been for a long time. But the new media is coming up from behind, and coming up rapidly. As long as the Constitution protects us, we'll be all right over the long run.
I absolutely agree with Ann Coulter's assessment of McCarthy; AP journalism would have gleefully pointed out any inaccuracy in Treason - and all they did was nitpick irrelevancies, so evidently she was right.My analysis is that the question, "When did they stop doing their job?" is miscast. The real question is, "When did we start believing their propaganda about what their job was?" And the question before that is, "How did we get from the fractiously independent journalism of the founding era to the homogenously leftist journalism of today?" And the answer to that, IMHO, is "The Associated Press." The telegraph and the AP changed the newspaper game from a bunch of independent operators - who had very little ability to get news faster than anyone else and therefore were in the opinion business, and only published weekly - into a bunch of veritable franchisees of the Associated Press. They are very strongly "associated," and that gives them the freedom to claim objectivity without fear of ridicule from their "competitors," who are actually now their associates. And, of course, claiming to be objective is proof of strong subjectivity.
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