Comments

You have commented 358 times on Rantburg.

Your Name

Your e-mail (optional)

Website (optional)

	My Original Nic Pic-a-Nic Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Foto

Submit your comments on this article

-Obits-

RIP to the legacy media, 1974-2024

2024-01-31

[WASHINGTONEXAMINER] By now, it’s a familiar and undisputed story. Journalism was once the profession of working-class people, unglamorous and interested in just reporting facts.
In fact, they used to be called "reporters." I think being "journalists" was supposed to pay more, and they gave you a trench coat.

It did pay lots more, until it stopped paying anything at all.

Then came Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein in the 1970s. Journalism was suddenly considered sexy.
Ooh! Ooh! Dustin Hoffman and... and... some other guy.
The profession became overrun with elites who badly slanted their stories to push the narrative of liberalism. As a result, they lost readers. And now the legacy media are dying.
Three words: Columbia School of Journalism. Four, if you count the preposition.
It’s all true. Still, in 2024 we seem to have reached a dramatic tipping point where the far-left Fourth Estate finally comes crashing down. Sports Illustrated is shutting down. The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are losing millions every week and laying off reporters.
Notice they're laying off reporters, not journalists.
CNN
...formerly the Cable News Network, now who know what it might stand for...
has no audience. Pitchfork, Jezebel, Gawker? Toast.
Does anybody even remember them?

Just consider: In 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned largely as the result of the reporting in the Washington Post. In 2024, nobody takes the Washington Post seriously. The modern liberal media reign lasted 50 years.
The Metro section used to be consistently amusing. I haven't read the Post in years. I still miss the late Washington Star. I think they might have been driven out of business because they always identified crooks by race, as in "Two black men held up a liquor store..."
Still, it can be constructive to note what went wrong, and how easily the media could have helped themselves. In my experience, it came down to one word: monkeyfishing.
Investigative ~~reporting~~ journalism at its finest.
In 2001, a man named Jay Forman wrote a piece for the liberal website Slate called "Monkeyfishing." It described a trip Forman said he took to Florida’s Lois Key with a "monkeyfisherman." The monkeyfisherman, wrote Forman, casts a fruit-baited fish line onto the island where research monkeys were kept. A monkey takes the bait and is then pulled into the water.

"Honest. I know somebody who seen it!"
"Monkeyfishing" was almost instantly revealed to be fake.
I knew it wasn't true. As soon as I started grinding my organ Jocko told me real monkeys would never fall for it.
Jack Shafer, the Slate editor who approved, edited, and ran the story, admitted that as soon as it went up, James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal and others "gouged huge holes" in the piece.
The word "shredded" pops to mind.
Here’s the thing: I could have prevented "Monkeyfishing." When Slate launched in 1996, I emailed Shafer asking to contribute. I was freelancing for the New York Press and getting good reactions to my stuff. Yes, I was conservative — a popular piece I had written was called "Confessions of a Right-Wing Rock Fan" — but this would be a plus because Slate was liberal and I could offer an entirely new audience.
That Slate discounted entirely.

Shafer rejected my offer, using profanity to describe my writing. Like other media liberals, he could not or would not comprehend that hiring a conservative could provide balance, drive traffic, and offer a safety valve against stories that were crazy. He would have been helping himself.
Ground his organ, did he? Eleven tuts.
In rejecting me, Shafer signed his own autopsy. Had I gone to Slate, I could have prevented "Monkeyfishing" because like anyone else outside of the East Coast bubble, I had common sense. The story sounded absurd. On top of that, my father was a top editor at National Geographic. I knew a lot about monkeys. There was no way monkeyfishing was a thing. At the first editorial meeting where it came up, I would have loudly announced that the story was surely bogus. I would have insisted on proof.
And prob'ly gotten fired.
It took Shafer and Slate several years and an investigation by some journalism students at Columbia University
The School of Journalism, no doubt.
in 2007 for them to admit as much. Failing upward, Shafer went on to become the media critic for Politico.
Anybody remember the Peter Principle?

In a recent analysis, Shafer argued there’s no crisis in journalism: "Yes, newspapers have contracted and laid off staff. Yes, more than a quarter of all U.S. newspapers (daily and weekly) have folded over the past 15 years. Yes, newspaper advertising revenue dropped 25% from 2019 to 2020. Yes, 42 of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers no longer publish daily. And yes, as you are well aware, the Washington Post has just announced 240 voluntary buyouts — nearly 10% of its staff — to correct for its unmet ’overly optimistic’ business projections. Yet, the heart still beats."
lub... dub...lub... dub... flutter... dub... lub... burp... lub... fibrillate... lub... dub...
Shafer claimed that "the heart still beats" because of "the willingness of subscribers" to keep the Washington Post going. This is false. The Washington Post has lost 500,000 subscribers since 2020. It is being kept alive by owner Jeff Bezos.
Money talks. Journalism walks.

Two months later, Shafer — wrong again — changed his tune, writing in a new column that there was no way to stop "the newspaper death spiral." He even defended Bezos: "After a decade of supporting and expanding the paper, Bezos must fear that his entire newspaper investment will be swept out to sea. That’s not fearmongering. Newspaper trend lines are cratering and may prove to be too steep for Bezos’ tastes."
"Cratering." We see a lot of that here, not always in journalism papers.
Fifty years is a decent run. Still, had the liberal media not walled itself off from the rest of America, they could have made it a century. That’s no monkey business.
But then they wouldn't have been liberal, would they?

Posted by:Fred

#5 WaPo would NOT have lasted as long as it has without Amazon.

Posted by: Abu Uluque 2024-01-31 12:52

#4 I caution everyone not to forget who the Washington Post's benefactor is and how he makes the money he uses to support WaPo's lies. WaPo would have lasted as long as it has without Amazon.

Posted by: Abu Uluque 2024-01-31 12:51

#3 "Driving the narrative" and being the next Woodward & Bernstein became the goal, not reporting facts and keeping opinion in editorials

Posted by: Frank G 2024-01-31 11:54

#2 I worked in the bidness. For a very long time the typical newsroom had 25 true believers for every common sense, eyes-open thinker.

It's not a recent phenomenon.

Posted by: M. Murcek 2024-01-31 08:21

#1 Journalism was once the profession of working-class people, unglamorous and interested in just reporting facts.

It was a trade - apprentice, journeyman, master. Then the so called institutions of 'higher learning' got involved credentialing for fun and profit. Gone were the days of learning about reality of the world/city on the beat.

Posted by: Procopius2k 2024-01-31 07:50

00:00