Letters to the Editor
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I think what we're batting around here is the question...
are we in a position to improve things? The obvious answer is yes. My point is that the viewing public has a lot to say about the direction that media takes at any given time. I think Glenn's point is that there are a lot of people who could be described as "corporate" who are nevertheless on the right side of some important questions. And a number of people have piped in to the effect that the rise of the blogosphere and of other independent information sources is a natural source of pressure on the old media to get with the program and realize that the same BS isn't going to sell yet again.
One need only compare the current mood to that of Spring 2003 to realize that we have indeed come a long way.
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Credentialism
First ran across this word re: Michael Gordon...dunno where he got caught at it - but these guys
"Politico has several reporters and editors who have been in this profession for two decades or more. They know that what counts is reputation over the long haul..."
Are doing exactly that.
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The viewing public
are we in a position to improve things? The obvious answer is yes. My point is that the viewing public has a lot to say about the direction that media takes at any given time.
Absolutely. They/we are the market. Part of what the leftosphere is doing is creating a market for a different kind of journalism.
But there are other factors also. for example, 4 dollar gas will kill the market for gigantic SUVs. Have the consumers changed? No. These are the same buyers. But new conditions have caused a change in behavior and expectations. What are the environmental changes that may cause media consumers to change their behavior and expectations?
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We Should Neither Lazily Overgeneralize Nor Tend To Dismiss Systematic Analyses
Again, I find it remarkable that there is such a remarkable degree of consistency in how the US' primarily corporate news media fall so evenly on the side of power and the hawks whenever hawkish foreign policies are proposed, and seem to only come out with hard skepticism & genuine criticism once those policies have gone bad.
The problem with speaking at this level of generality -- "find it remarkable that there is such a remarkable degree of consistency in how the US' primarily corporate news media fall so evenly on the side of power and the hawks " -- is that it's impossible to prove or disprove. If I list 50 different prominent people in the "corporate media" who, for instance, currently oppose militarism against Iran or who favor withdrawal from Iraq, are going to say that those are just a handful of examples and/or they are just there to give an illusion of balance?
Thanks for your response, but a few quick points.
One: You don't have to analyze the people and individuals inside the media corporations to do a simple black box analysis of what comes out. Engineers are regularly given the task of figuring out not just the internal structure of an unknown 'black' box but the purpose of its design.
Sure my analyses touch on hypotheses for what's inside the box and why it may act the way it does, but my main complaints and questions have remained at the measurable output of the box.
If we bar ourselves at the outset from noticing that we can predict with a pretty high degree of verifiability the output of the box, we have committed to denying ourselves a crucial piece of data.
There is simply a degree to which it doesn't matter in the slightest what media professionals believe themselves to be doing when it is also possible to analyze the actual output.
As media 'consumers', if they want to view themselves as 'producers', we do not have to limit ourselves to the field of analysis preferred by the producers. News media producers will continue to urge that we focus on this particular interesting fact, or that particular twist in their personal or newsroom story. Yet we are left no way to explain our ability to reliably predict the output of the box.
Therefore we see that on an initial level, it simply doesn't matter whether an individual is pro or anti militarist, or in favor of or opposed to good journalism. Not, that is, when we first are working to systematically understand the output. It could be that you get similar results from people who have all kinds of different life experiences and personal ideologies or fascinatingly different newsroom histories.
Anthropologists, for example, regularly encounter systematized social behaviors which the individuals participating in those social behaviors have all sorts of notions about what they are doing and why. It's the job of an anthropologist, in part, to understand and tease out how it is in a society that people with wildly different perspectives floating around in their heads on what they are doing and why and yet are able to converge into strikingly similar behaviors.
Not everyone is motivated by their own political gain. Human beings are more complex than that.
But again, if I list them, you're likely to say that those are just exceptions that prove the rule (the way people say if they claim that the Corporate Media will never publish stories harmful to the Government and someone lists all the times they have done exactly that).
First, obviously if it is possible to observe comprehensible, predictable outcomes from such a variety of complicated motivations, we still have a question.
Yet, I would point out that all examples aren't the same.
Your writing and blogging is valuable precisely because, like good scientists, you know that it isn't good enough to list 50 examples of this or that which some people like to view as one way and other people like to view as another.
You yourself take the care to engage each and every example and tease out the significant aspects of them and the less relevant or even dishonest interpretations.
Let me ask specifically:
Whether or not any of my views are totally and completely wrong, do you have any examples of when the huge and giant errors and collapses you document have happened to fall on the liberal side of the spectrum, or the dovish side, particularly in regard to foreign policy?
We could begin to attempt a synthetic explanation if that were possible, for example, trying to understand when these 'collapses' fall in a hawkish direction and when they fall in a dovish direction.
What we absolutely cannot do, whether we think it helpful or not, or common sense or not, or complex or not, is dismiss the importance of a conclusion if we happen to notice that all those collapses happen to favor the hawkish versions of, say, U.S. foreign policy (and of course this in no way is a 'Republican' vs 'Democratic' question).
That's important. If true (and I'm waiting for the disputed counterexamples in which these national media collapses favor the dovish approach), that is a hugely significant conclusion even if no one ever aims to explain it and is happy leaving it as a black box problem.
Are there these counter-examples? If there are not, is this by any definition and insignificant conclusion?
And if you believe that the corporate media is inherently pro-rich and pro-hawk, what is the solution?
It might be the case that even if that statement were true, you as an individual might be doing exactly the most helpful thing (except of course for yielding and giving in to my brilliant and superior point).
But my word limit has been reached. If not I would have given the one sentence solution which would have perfectly and easily solved our nation's news media dilemma by first building a