Victor Davis Hanson on the US media's wholesale abandonment of journalistic integrity:
The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.
Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief — but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.
Read the whole thing. I agree with most of what VDH says, but if Obama wins and the Democrats make gains I'm not sure if his prediction of long-term damage to the reputation of the MSM will hold true.
The Democrats will likely bring back the Fairness Doctrine, and pursue other measures to curtail the influence of talk radio, bloggers and other new media outlets, which (along with a few conservative outlets like Fox News and the WSJ) have dared to question Obama's motives, past associations and fitness to be president.
At the same time they'll do everything in their power to prop up the 'old media' that has in effect become an arm of the Democratic party, and which will spend the next four years portraying the Obama presidency as a spectacular success enjoying universal support, whatever the reality.
2 comments:
At the same time they'll do everything in their power to prop up the 'old media' that has in effect become an arm of the Democratic party, and which will spend the next four years portraying the Obama presidency as a spectacular success enjoying universal support, whatever the reality.
Some observations:
1. Given the political slants of many dying newspapers, like the NYT and LAT, most of their employees would likely welcome government bailouts and de facto ownership since a) there'd be complete job security for those who "cooperate,"
b) editorially, nothing would change for them, c) their workload would be reduced since they'd get to determine what stories were "important" weeks or even months in advance, and d) they'd no longer have to get involved with anything messy and legally hazardous like "investigative journalism."
2. Downside: given the above, "subscription" and "circulation" for such papers would henceforth be in the form of free handouts at supermarkets, Democratic Party rallies, and public postings on bulletin boards like the Soviets used to do with Pravda and Izvestia.
OT:
Link to PA newspapers (response to your hotair comment)
http://www.usnpl.com/panews.php/
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