The Unbearable Lightness of Being the MSM

Most "reporters" dwell on dirty laundry because they don't understand the serious issues.

It has been obvious for some time that the Gingrich strategy for capturing the GOP nomination for President includes running against the "news" media as well as the President, and Saturday's primary results in South Carolina seem to vindicate the shrewdness of that plan. Newt realized early on that much of the voter indignation that has manifested itself in the Tea Party movement is driven by media complicity with Obama in his ongoing effort to ignore the will of the people and transform the U.S. into a European-style social democracy. This concordance between Newt and the voters on the untoward and destructive role of the media in our political discourse was blindingly obvious last Thursday when Newt's reprimand of CNN's John King during the GOP debate drew two standing ovations from the audience.

Much has been written, of course, about media malpractice. Most commentators put it down to liberal bias, but that is actually a symptom of a larger problem -- the intellectual shallowness that afflicts most contemporary journalists. One reason John King opened the CNN debate with a question about Newt's sex life is that it required less cerebral exertion than a more substantive query about such things as the cause of high unemployment or the constitutionality of Obamacare's individual mandate. This lack of intellectual depth is why one moderator of a CNBC debate, who gave each candidate thirty seconds to propose an alternative to Obamacare, was clearly shocked and angered when Gingrich accurately labeled it an "absurd question." She had no idea that she had said something stupid.

It’s simple.

The liberal media sold us on Barack Obama.

Conservatives are angry about the way the media accomplished this-by obscuring who he really is, and by purveying outright lies.

Independents are beginning to realize they’ve been duped.

Thus the anger at the media is both broad, and deep. That’s human nature.

The most important constituency however, is not independents. It’s women.

And females, when they perceive that chaos is looming, always ditch the pretty boy for the street-fighting gunslinger.

That’s biology.

Go Newt!

Much has been written, of course, about media malpractice. Most commentators put it down to liberal bias, but that is actually a symptom of a larger problem -- the intellectual shallowness that afflicts most contemporary journalists.
The intellectual shallowness of journalists is driven by the complacency which is the natural result of the monopoly implied by the wire services. You will say, "there are multiple wire services," and that is true - but the reality is that the business model of the wire service revolves around its advantage over the customer (not over each other). And what is that advantage over the customer? It is that, at any given moment, the wire service knows news that the customer doesn't know yet.
Of course the Internet dramatically undercuts that advantage, but the historical reality has been that the customers would have been woefully uninformed about recent dramatic events in distant locations compared to the editor of the newspaper plugged into "the wire."
But just how "woeful" that ignorance was depends, of course, on the actual significance of the news. And how do I know how woeful my ignorance actually is, if in fact I don't know what I don't know? Well, in the present, that question is unanswerable; I always am ignorant of what the next report is going to say and mean. But as a philosophical issue, there is no reason to restrict my attention to the present. Restricting the issue to the present is precisely the home turf of the journalist.
At present I am at some disadvantage to the journalist and his "wire." But if we look at the history of the news, "the wire" becomes irrelevant. About incidents which happened even as recently as ten years ago, we know now everything the journalist knew, and we have at least a glimmer of how history will judge the events in the more distant future. And we have a century and a half of experience of what happened, and what the journalist did, or did not, reports.
The first obvious thing about history is, of course, that in historical perspective most of what journalists report is irrelevant. And the second thing about journalism and history is that, for all the hypersensitivity of our electronic antennae, historical surprises happen. So we know two things:

Journalism is predominantly about things that no one would think of tuning in to learn about ten years later, and,

Journalism does not prevent painful surprises.
The other thing about journalism which would be obvious to any conservative is that journalism emphasizes the failings of those who are most depended on, and downplays the failings of those who are not counted on. It's a simple question of the desire of the journalist to attract attention - and the journalist's knowledge of the fact that only the unusual attracts attention. The consequence of that is that journalism is about what usually does not happen.

The realization that journalists are intellectually shallow is scarcely something to marvel at.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.