MSM – R.I.P.

[Call me Deacon Blues]

September 6, 2009 (BBC) The US Mainstream Media, on life support for the past four years, passed away quietly over the weekend with the cancellation of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports and the announcement of its replacement, News Survivor, a reality series where a dozen aspiring reporters are embedded with US troops in Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and, according to a press release, “are challenged to get the story, then get out or get killed.” It will compete with Fox News’ popular News Apprentice with Geraldo Rivera. Most observers trace the death of the MSM to the unchallenged presence of a prostitute in the White House pressroom, and the subsequent scandal involving both media and White House customers. The MSM was 59 years old.

I grew up in the sixties. I’m from a black and white age, and I’m not talking about race relations; television for me came from a big wooden box with an almost-round screen, a pair of rabbit ears perched on top. It looked nothing like the massive, flat-screen wonders we have today. I didn’t watch all that much anyway; there was too much to do outside to spend my time glued to a TV set. Then in 1962, right around my ninth birthday, the United States and Russia decided to play chicken on the high seas around Cuba. One of my earliest TV memories is of news commentators talking about grainy pictures of missile launchers; seeing some scientist pointing to a poster of a “doomsday clock” on CNN these days doesn’t even begin to convey what the sheer terror of imminent nuclear annihilation feels like, and don’t kid yourself – we came that close. The faces on the screen were as grim and as scared as the faces in my family, as they were again 13 months later when Jack Kennedy was gunned down, the grief on their faces as real as ours.

After that, television news was a part of my life, from watching the 1964 political conventions gavel to gavel (I was a geeky kid, ok?), to Watergate. Through it all, of course, ran the thread that was Viet Nam, watching the body count rise night after night, year after year, as I slowly approached draft age. The stories from the war, I think, kept us watching, concerned; combat deaths don’t seem to affect us now the way they did then – but that is a subject for another day. There was one constant throughout, no matter what the story. The people in front of the cameras were journalists; they came, by and large, from a print background, and they had a newspaper reporter’s doggedness and sense of outrage. The Watergate scandal looms so large in our memory that it obscures the excellent reporting by both print and television media during the sixties; this was the decade of the moon shot, of the civil rights movement, of rock music and of flower power, of Bobby Baker and Jimmy Hoffa, and the media covered the stories quite well, albeit with a certain naiveté that is today only a memory.

It’s not too difficult to pinpoint where things went wrong; apart from the backslapping among reporters and journalistic prizes that went with the Watergate investigation, an added benefit was increased newspaper sales and for the networks, increased ratings. To put it another way, Yellow Journalism sells papers. After Watergate was over, you had one sensational story after another, from the oil embargo to Three Mile Island to the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Ah, the Hostage Crisis – now there was a story! The Shah had been put in business by a Republican president, and both Democrat and Republican administrations continued to support him through the years, all in the name of strategic advantage over the Soviets. When the regime fell and the American embassy was invaded, the networks were presented with a ratings bonanza; not to trivialize the awful ordeal those poor innocent people went through, the Iranian Hostage Crisis was the precursor to the Runaway Bride – the story that goes on forever. The hype that a story could generate became more important than the story itself, thus Iran begat Nightline, which begat CNN, which begat Fox News. I think this marks the beginning of media manipulation as well; Jimmy Carter was savaged over Iran, unfairly for the most part. The Republican Party milked the situation then for all it was worth, much the same as they use the news to their advantage today. I don’t think it was a coincidence that the hostages were released the same day $8 billion dollars in Iranian assets were released, which was the same day Ronald Reagan took office; do you?

Today’s media bears no resemblance whatsoever to that which I grew up with. My local newspaper, which at one time was a Pulitzer Prize winning operation, was bought out by media conglomerate Gannett, and has become a focus-group driven, advertising riddled joke. They even have advertisements on the editorial page! Pitiful. Newspapers in the major metropolitan areas, from New York to Los Angeles are shells of their former selves, and in Washington DC you get either the mildly conservative Post(!) or the moonbat Moonie Times. The irony of all this is that they’ve done it to themselves; Woodward and Bernstein, through good reporting and judicious use of anonymous sources, ferreted out a story that mattered. Unfortunately, this precipitated a landslide of “gotcha” journalism, with each story’s facts more shaky than the last, until we’ve come to an era where the very veracity of newspaper reporting is in question, from the whole cloth fabrications of Jayson Blair to the cynical manipulations of Judith Miller, and her handler, Ahmad Chalibi. The good news is that there are still some pockets of journalistic integrity in the newspaper business, mostly in medium sized cities, where both Republican and Democrat publishers keep their political views confined to the editorial page and pursue truth wherever it leads them.

Television news was long the laughingstock of “real journalists”, but the laugh’s on them now; broadcast media is running the news, and we’re all the worse for it. They’ve become an obsessive-compulsive medium, fixated on one story at a time, the less substance the better. You only have to look at the difference between Tony Blair and George W. Bush to see why. Casting aside ideological differences for a second, consider their last joint press conference. One speaks in eloquent, complete sentences, the other sounds like a drug-addled mall rat; yet Blair went to a small college in Edinburgh before getting his law degree from Oxford, while Bush went to prestigious Yale and got his MBA from Harvard. At the very least, you would expect them to be intellectually equal, but the difference is glaringly obvious. Unfortunately, George W. Bush is all too typical of a good chunk of the American populace; no wonder he got elected. And no wonder the media panders to them; if they’re dumb enough to buy the boy king, they’re dumb enough to buy anything. So there’s no need to create anything of substance; just as prime-time television has lost both dramas and comedies – which need sets and actors and writers – to “reality” shows, which only serve to prove just how truly narcissistic and ignorant we have become, so has television news. Why produce something to make people think when they’re incapable of thinking?

And if you think George W. Bush holds you and me in contempt – and he does – that surely pales before the contempt the MSM holds for us. Sally Quinn’s famous column about how Bill Clinton had committed such an “outrage” upon the good people inside the beltway says all you’ll ever need to know. http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_05_29_atrios_archive.html#111749107772753237

Years ago, TV news people were just like you and me – they made salaries no different from your neighbor or the guy down the street; they wore the same suit every day on their newscasts, probably wore it to church too (and I would guess that most of them went to church, on occasion, though I wouldn’t doubt that some of the things they’d seen in their careers made them wonder about God’s mercy). They weren’t the megastars they are today – they knew the value of a dollar and the values of the working man. Remember that gaffe Bush senior made about not knowing the price of bread and milk? He hadn’t been to a grocery store in so long (since he had the “help” go to the store for him), that he’d never seen an optical scanner before. I wonder if O’Reilly, or Tweety or Stephanopolis know how much a quart of milk costs. The people they cover sure as hell don’t. Their cultures have become so intertwined that while they surely know what’s going on, they’re not telling us about it. It’s like steroids in sports – the reporters are there in the locker room, every day; they talk to the athletes, hang out with them, swap stories – don’t tell me that they were unaware of juicing. Access to the athletes is their bread and butter and they don’t want to jeopardize it; it’s the same for the political reporters in Washington – they’re on the gravy train and they don’t want to get off.

I turned off the media after the fall election. I haven’t missed it a bit. I’m actually more informed than I was before, and my blood pressure is down too; the only reason I pay a bit of attention to say, what’s said on Meet the Press, is to confirm my decision. Lil’ Russ never fails to remind me why television news isn’t worth watching. What’s doubly humorous is that the smug self-satisfaction of Russert and O’Reilly and Roberts and their ilk is based on a lie. They’re like the biggest goldfish in the bowl, unaware of the sea outside their door. Consider this: 1) There are almost 300 million people in the United States; 2) During May 2005, MTP had almost 4 million viewers – divide that by 4 weeks and Lil’ Russ had 1 million viewers per week. Let’s see, that means that big, bad, influential Tim Russert had a whopping audience of oh, about 3 tenths of one percent of the US population! This is fun when you think about it. With an even smaller audience than the MTM poobah, the self-important David Broder, “I like to eat Candy” Crowley, Leslie Blitzer, and the rest of the pundit-ocracy aren’t even blips on most people’s radar – most American’s wouldn’t recognize them if they walked right up to them! While they may have influence over the intelligentsia, and while they may think that we of the great unwashed aren’t worthy of their time, this is still our country, and their control over us is an illusion.

We have two choices when it comes to the Mainstream Media. We can either kill it or cure it. The more we investigate, the more stories we break, the more we point out the lying and manipulation and hypocrisy to the public at large, the quicker we can eradicate them. They will either change or die. We don’t have to depend on them any more; as long as we have folks like Kos and Atrios, Alterman and Marshall, The Rude Pundit and Wonkette, and sites running the gamut of progressive thought from AmericaBlog to Liberal Oasis to The Daily Howler to Salon to BuzzFlash and on and on and on, we can win this battle. We’re smarter than they are. And when we get the truth out, we’ll kick out the bastards running this country. Because the American people are smarter than they are too.

[AuntPatsy]

1. Thank you, beautfiully written....and heartbreakingly accurate.

[newyawker99]

2. kick

:kick: