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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The shrinking impact of mainstream media |
| 2015-12-11 |
| Can there be any further doubt that we have now come to a time when the rightward half of the country perceives much of the mainstream media (the broadcast networks, big city newspapers, etc.) to be carriers of Democratic and/or left-leaning news and opinion? The media deny this, but their denials — indeed, the very idea that the way to address this matter is to deny or contest it — change nothing. The bottom line is that perhaps one-half of the potential audience for these media outlets holds negative opinions about them. This practice confounds most people's understanding of the marketing of mass products. Were millions of people, for example, to complain to automakers that the standard radios provided don't work well enough, the manufacturers would endeavor to fix it to the critics' satisfaction — not, as the media have done, simply deny that anything's wrong. So that's an important difference between car companies and the legacy media, but what explains it, and what does the future hold for such media? Understand what's meant by the first of these questions. It's not what explains why the reporters and editors don't care that they are perceived as biased. They don't care because the overwhelming majority of them are Democrats and/or liberals, and they think their point of view is both objective and correct. Rather, the question is why their employers — the publishers and corporate CEOs — don't care. It is, after all, those people, not the reporters or editors, who are responsible for the growth and prosperity of their media properties. Lots of theories are plausible. One is that the so-called firewall separating the editorial from the business side of media companies makes it very difficult, as a practical matter, for corporate leaders to exercise control over the editorial policies of their media outlets. Another theory is that the corporate CEOs share the political mindset of their reporters, and therefore don't see anything wrong with the journalism they're practicing, and are willing to live with reduced viewership and readership for that reason. Perhaps the most difficult theory is that, at a time when the very existence of newspapers and TV is threatened by the Internet and social media, the CEOs don't much care to spend a lot of time dealing with issues as thorny and intractable as the editorial slant of their news and opinion reporting. Whatever the explanation, it's unlikely that this state of affairs will go on much longer without notable consequences for the mainstream media. The reasons: the explosive growth, courtesy of the Internet, of conservative and libertarian studies, investigative news reports and commentary; and the alignment, by the leadership of the Republican Party, with the claims of media bias being made by all the right-of-center media and conservative journalists within the mainstream media. Indeed, and as suggested in a recent piece in RealClearPolitics, a diminution of the influence of the mainstream media may "explain the gravity-defying trajectory of the Trump campaign." To be sure, it can be argued that the amount of coverage Trump has received in media of all kinds has enabled his dominance among Republicans polled, but this argument ignores the extraordinarily negative coverage the gentleman has received, even by (one might say especially by) conservatives. At a time when so much of the mainstream media display a politically monochromatic view of the world, they are being ignored by large numbers of people who no longer see them as objective chroniclers of anything. |
| Posted by:Pappy |
| #7 It's encouraging, but before we get cocky, let's remember leftwingers largely controls social media and entertainment, and pump out the agitprop via those channels, while suppressing anti-Narrative thoughts. In fact, as fewer and fewer people pay attention to the old media, the left will ramp up their efforts direct the new media to their advantage. It's not called Twitter gulag for nothing. |
| Posted by: charger 2015-12-11 17:13 |
| #6 They're all insignifigant, maye they'll fade away, (No more advertisements.) |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2015-12-11 14:39 |
| #5 Says it all. I read it maybe five years ago. Bias broadcast journalist Bernard Goldberg reveals a corporate news culture in which the close-mindedness is breathtaking, journalistic integrity has been pawned to liberal opinion, and "entertainment" trumps hard news every time.\ I believe the author was Danny Rather's producer for a number of years. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2015-12-11 13:46 |
| #4 Trump has done a great deal to neuter the lame stream media. He doesn't give a flip about PC. It is refreshing. People are tired of debates that are stifled by PC. The MSM senses the danger of a guy like Trump to their influence. The MSM sold their trustworthiness to the Democratic Party and they are paying the price. They abdicated a free press that had been a part of our society. This election year is payback for forgetting that the voters elect Presidents rather than the elites of both parties and the media. It is payback for all the PC horseshit. It is payback for all the stuff that got rammed down our throats without our consent. It is payback for not listening to the electorate. It is a reminder that we elect our represents and by God they'd better represent us. We tried to tell them in 2010 and 2014 and they did not listen. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2015-12-11 10:34 |
| #3 I think three strands are necessary: the Democrat Party (marxist/islamist), the main stream media, and the Uniparty/Globalists, the dominant faction in the Republican Party (who, along with the Saudis and the globists' SuperPacs fund the main stream media and all elections) for way too many years. |
| Posted by: pyromancer76 2015-12-11 09:10 |
| #2 Freedom of the Press was about the technology not the modern institution that calls itself the 'Press'. The internet is the closest entity to what that freedom was about. It's also why so many in power want to control it. Place the libel law covering the MSM in line with the 14th Amendment of equal protection before the law with serious $$$ consequences and you'll end up with a legion of real fact checkers and editors rather than party operatives. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2015-12-11 08:00 |
| #1 The two are one and the same, Democratic party and main stream media. Both are losing. |
| Posted by: Dale 2015-12-11 07:06 |