Letters to the Editor
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It has nothing to do with real journalism and everything to do with advertising demographics and survival in the medi marketplace
Who has disposable income and can be persuaded to spend it for products that promise anonymous sex, anonymous violence and racist and misogynistic snark? Twenty, thirty and forty-something white American males who have learned that they cannot afford to be empathetic in a ruthless marketplace.
That is all you need to know to understand that mindless march to war as well as George Bush and Don Imus. In most mediums mass-market journalism cannot survive unless it caters to that audience because they have the most disposable income and they have predictable pavlovian responses to time-tested advertising tropes.
That seems obvious when it comes to cable news and talk radio but it is less obvious in the case of major national newspapers. But their target demographic is the stockholder of the companies that target the most lucrative demographic.
Most journalists don’t consciously cater to them, they either have jobs or they don’t and they learn how to keep those jobs that pay well when they get them. Sex sells. War sells when it is experienced vicariously as it is taught in video games. Racist and misogynistic snark sells when insecurity and resentment fuel it.
The last election proved once again that that demographic is a minority. Reasonable folks have other means of getting the news.
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In the interest of brevity
I know that it is important to support one's arguments with logic and verifiable references. And I know that simple generalizations are almost never sufficient to describe the complexity of any social process.
I also know that it is equally important to be succinct when possible.
That being said:
MSM news is a joke!
And the MSM journalists and reporters who report the MSM news are a joke! They're a joke! A joke!
They're such a joke they make me want to cry.
And as for the reasons the MSM and its journalists are such a joke:
"they're too well known to repeat."
If I ever get a tattoo, that's what it will say, "MSM news is a joke!"
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He-Said-She-Said Laziness and Journalistic Hubris
Thank you, James Levy, for saying it so vividly.
Many, many years ago, at a forum of about 500 journalists, I witnessed Jim Lehrer literally foam at the mouth in rage at a small-town reporter who dared to ask him about the "objectivity" of simply quoting one person from each "side" of a story without digging deeper to determine who was telling the truth and who was lying.
(The classic case, of course, being the hypothetical reporter who hears rumors of extermination camps in 1938, and instead of investigating on her own, simply gets one quote from a Jewish refugee agency describing the camps, and another quote from Himmler denying everything.)
It was a polite question, respectfully posed, utterly lacking in accusation, yet Lehrer exploded at the poor guy, pointing and spitting and screaming, red-faced, that guys like him were to blame for everything wrong in journalism.
It stunned the entire room into silence, and the reporter slunk away like a whipped dog.
I wondered later if Lehrer's violent overreaction had something to do with the reporter including in his question a quote from Molly Ivins, who I believe was no fan of Lehrer's.
But now I think it was - and remains today among all the MSM - defensiveness born of terror.
Terror that if they ever admit the true extent of their failures and mistakes, their facade of professionalism will crumble and everyone will see them for the lickspittles they are.
It's no coincidence that the "citizen journalists" of the Internet have stepped up to the plate just as the MSM commits professional suicide.
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Going to war
It is not entirely the fault of the media that the counter arguments to invading Iraq were not put before the public.
It is generally assumed that in a democracy there will be different points of view and that one of the duties of the political party in opposition to to offer alternative views and/or play the devil's advocate.
All along the Democratic members of congress were astonishingly weak in offering an alternative vision.
When, a few days after 9/11 Bush appeared on TV and said that the rest of his administration would be devoted to a war on terror, which of them stood up and said: "Declaring war on terror is just as silly as declaring war on drugs or poverty, because it is a war that can never be one. All we can do is endeavor to remove the most egregious wrongs, perceived and real, that fuel terrorism, and try to ensure that those who use terrorism as an alternative to negotiation are not rewarded"?
Not a one of them. But surely it would have been reported if they had, and surely they would have been invited on Tim Russert to put forward their point of view.
But it probably would have made no difference.
In the UK opinion polls showed that approximately 80% of those polled before the invasion of Iraq did not believe there were grounds for invading Iraq, but Blair sent troops anyway. Blair, like Bush, still managed to get reelected, (though now, like Bush, his political stock seems to have ceased trading.)
Now, when we have democrats like Hillary Clinton saying that she voted to enable the invasion of Iraq because she thought Bush just wanted a big stick to negotiate with, but now she realizes that she misread his intentions, do we really want to put her up against people like Ahmedjinabad when she can't even read a guy who went to grad school at Yale just like she did? I think not.
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Ego and denial.
Got to agree with your premise about the MSM's complete denial. My local paper, Chicago Tribune, which boasts that it has never endorsed a Dem for president or even governor. It is still supporting Bush and the Iraq war. It's hard not to be angry all the time about this myopia. It's about ego and not admitting a mistake, or many mistakes. They think it would hurt their credibility. They've got it as backwards as the Dems who gave Bush support for his Iraq war. The credibility of the MSM is eroding precisely because they continue to support a lying, scandalous administration.
Bush and Cheney would be done in about a minute if the MSM would just stop propping them up. Instead of repeating verbatim Cheney's lies about al-Qaeda and Saddam, just put those statements next to the facts. It's what's happening with Gonzalez, and he has no place to hide from the truth. The same thing would happen for Bush. He would literally be afraid to be in front of a live camera and microphone, if he knows that each and every statement he makes will be examined for 'truthiness'.