QandO

August 30, 2004

Blogs threaten main stream media's exlusive hold on news and opinion
Posted by McQ

I think John Podhoretz has a good point here, and, frankly, I agree with his conclusion, but first check out this part of his op/ed about the left's bottled up rage:

This election is about one thing and one thing only: Which of the two candidates is best suited to be this nation's commander in chief.

And as we speak, a 2004 election plotline is developing among those who wish to see George W. Bush defeated. The plotline is this: The efforts by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to cast doubt on John Kerry's war record may be the tipping point of this campaign in Bush's favor. And if indeed that is so, the rage that liberals and Democrats will direct toward Bush will be something terrible to see.

The election is about who is best suited to be commander in chief. John Kerry made sure of that when he did his hokey "reporting for duty" schtick. With his salute and his "band of brothers" he made it about that. It appears he may rue the day he did so. But then faced with running on his 20 year Senate record or his 120 day Vietnam record, he really had little choice, did he?

Enter the Swift Boat Vets (who had been ignored by the media as well as the Kerry campaign since May when they first announced their presence) and their attack on Kerry's fitness to be c-in-c. Since then the SBV's effect has been slowly eroding Kerry's support.

Despite the lack of any evidence that the Bush campaign or Republicans questioned the patriotism of either McCain or Cleland in their last elections, those claims have now passed into legend among the left, just as the belief that the use of Willie Horton was at the behest of Bush 41 (instead of first used by Al Gore) and that Bush 43 "stole" the election.

What the Swift Boat Vets will have done, if Kerry loses, is add to the impotent rage felt by those on the left.

At a panel discussion yesterday on the press and the election at the Harvard Club, two media doyens — Joe Klein of Time and David Gergen of U.S. News — pronounced themselves frightened by this prospect and the damage it might do to our democracy.

One only has to revist our fairly recent past to understand why Klein and Gergen feel that way. The '60s and early '70s were an era of leftist violence the likes of which this country hadn't seen before. The Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army were staples of that violence. The frustration of the left at their inability to have their way spawned violent groups who murdered policemen and destroyed property. Will we see a return of the "Days of Rage?"

But that wasn't really Podhoretz's point in this little epistle. It was more about the entity known as the "main stream media" and its future.

Others on the panel — Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal and Jill Abramson of The New York Times — fretted about the capacity of the mainstream media to play the role of fact-finding truth-teller in an age dominated by cable news and the Internet.

I was on the panel too, and I feel like I was the only one who didn't arrive at the Harvard Club riding on my pet dinosaur.

I've been listening to mainstream-media types talk about the terrible threat posed to the news business by one new phenomenon or other since I began my career 22 years ago. The complaint is invariably, and drearily, the same: Whatever is new is bad because it supposedly lowers the historically high standards of the mainstream media.

The last two years in particular have seen the explosion of a new medium — the personal Internet newspaper, or blog — that has already and will forever change the way people get their information.

This is a thrilling development — unless you are a mainstream-media Big Fish.

Interesting. So blogs are a "threat to the news business"? Call me crazy, but it seems to me that the main stream media is more of a threat to the news business than blogs are. Its they who the blogs are finding to be, in many cases, "factually challenged". It is blogs who are exposing institutional biases the MSM has been denying for years. It is blogs who are picking up stories that the MSM would prefer to spike.

What blogs are is a threat to business as usual among the MSM. Blogs refuse to let the MSM have the exclusive rights to what is and isn't news.

And that scares the hell out of them. So we see this appeal to "journalistic standards" and how they're hobbled by them while we nasty bloggers aren't.

Guess they've never heard of commenters and the instant feedback they bring.

Podhoretz points to the perfect case study. The event which has finally, given the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the MSM about irresponsible journalism, pushed them over the brink and made them recognize and acknowledge the threat to their monopoly.

The success of the Swift-boat vets' ads is the tale of the triumph of the nation's alternative media. The mainstreamers didn't want to touch the story with a 10-foot pole, and they didn't. But the alternative media did. Amateur reporters and fact-gatherers offered independent substantiation for some of the charges. It turned out the criticisms of the Swifties weren't quite so easily dismissed.

Because there was new information coming out every day, there was more and more to discuss on talk radio and cable news channels. And the story just wouldn't go away, because millions of people were interested in it.

This democratization of the news is clearly a good thing, if only because it increases available sources of information in a democracy.

But it isn't a good thing if you're a proud part of an Establishment whose authority is being eroded and whose control of the marketplace is being successfully challenged.

No, it scares the hell out of them. Just as Gutenberg's bible took the exclusive interpretation of the bible out of the hands of priests and "democratized" it by putting it into "everyman's" hands, so has the internet and blogs changed the way news is reported and consumed.

And it worries the big boys to death.

What these Establishment-media types will never do — what they can never do — is consider the possibility that the 24-hour news cycle and the rise of talk radio and the Internet are all positive developments.

And I would argue they can't consider that possibility — not only because their platforms are slowly sliding into the quicksand, but because these alternative phenomena have been of great benefit to conservative ideas, anti-liberal attitudes and Republican politicians.

They hate the Swift-boat story. Hate it with a passion. Some of it's based in genuine conviction. Some of it's patently ideological. And some of it's based in fear. They are worried the bell is beginning to toll for them, and they're right.

Bingo. And its only going to get worse for them.

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