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Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:00 AM

The decay of serious journalism and Rachel Maddow's new show

The New Republic -- of all places -- laments the loss of "nuance or intellectual rigor" on television as epitomized by MSNBC's troubling decision to give an actual liberal her own show.

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  • Thursday, August 21, 2008 07:41 AM

    It's not that...

    The problem is a lack of liberal talking heads pushing a point of view that is wrong with the media. It's that there is the idea that there should be the liberal media and the conservative media.

    MSNBC should not be the answer to Fox News. The answer to Fox News is to continually undermine their credibility and destroy their business model (biased propaganda as news) as responsible journalists continue to put forward accurate and unbiased reporting.

    The problem is that the only outlets putting forward such work are NPR and PBS and they have low ratings because they don't sink to the lowest common denominator.

    What all of this points to is audience driven news production where the audience only consume information that is transformed and packaged as entertainment. We are caught in a very vicious circle that will be very difficult to break.

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