February 4, 2005
The Quiet Spectacle
By Paul Geary

We’re in the midst of spectacle, and many people aren't even aware of it.

Not every watershed event in history is marked by explosions, walls tumbling, or changes of government. We’re experiencing a sea-change, the type that political science textbooks 50 years from now will describe in apoplectic terms to wide-eyed students, who will have difficulty believing we actually used to live this way.

I’m talking about the intellectual near-disintegration of the mainstream media, or "MSM." (That its new moniker is a dismissive acronym is telling in itself.) It’s been in the works for a number of years, but we’re seeing the start of real momentum in the avalanche.

Every substantial change in the major media has brought with it change in the nation's politics and culture. When radio took hold in the 1930s, it allowed Franklin Roosevelt to sidestep the nation's newspaper editors, who had previously held a loose hegemony over the nation's information distribution, and take his message directly to the living rooms of voters. The result: our only president to win four elections and serve more than two terms, and the advent of the modern welfare state.

Television soon took hold and with it came candidate-based (rather than party- or machine- based) campaigns.

Journalists in the 1950s realized the awesome power that they had somewhat accidentally acquired as three national networks -- ABC, NBC, and CBS -- within a decade dominated the distribution of news. (Major newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post retained significant influence, but television reached far more people more immediately.) Probably most of the nation’s first television journalists felt honor-bound to adhere to journalistic standards where objectivity was at least striven for. Certainly much energy was devoted to creating and debating standards about what constituted objectivity, and how could a journalist remain ethically pure? Tim Russert took it so far as to eschew voting, believing even that toe-dip into the political process compromised his integrity as an impartial observers of the nation’s politics.

But in hindsight, many of those "objective" journalists were in fact advocates for causes of the day despite protestations to the contrary. The primary reason we view their broadcasts to have been objective (beyond of course the constant reminders to that effect of those in the profession) is that history has judged them to be right, and therefore there’s no controversy. The networks were on the correct side of history when they covered the civil rights movement with a sympathetic tone. They were on the correct side of history when they raised questions about the Vietnam War (as opposed to today’s MSM, which has no doubt the Iraq War is terribly wrong). They were on the correct side of history when they dogged a president who was willing to blatantly break the law to get reelected.

One can trace the rise in talk radio in the mid-1990s to the slowly rising reaction against the not-so-objective offerings of the networks, which were increasingly missing the mark and displayed bias that history and hindsight have not judged as favorably as Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate or the New York Times’ reporting of the Pentagon Papers. Cable television's ascendance, despite multiplying channels by a factor of ten, gave viewers the choice to avoid news rather than more choices. CNN was novel in that it was on all the time, but its approach to journalism was hardly different from that of the three old-line networks.

Perhaps in reaction to talk radio, perhaps in reaction to Fox News (the first real alternative to the four other major news networks), now we’re hitting a point where MSM journalists seem not to bother to vet sources, fact-check stories, or attempt to provide meaningful context if what they've got at hand fits the agenda. Here’s where the spectacle comes in.

Just in the last few months, we've witnessed two scandalous non-stories pushed just before the election: the CBS/Bush guard-duty debacle, and the "missing" bombs story. We've witnessed a CNN executive imply that the American military is killing journalists, only to have Rep. Barney Frank -- Barney Frank! -- demand proof, which was not forthcoming because it doesn’t exist. Add to this dozens of smaller examples of bias every day from a profession populated with an overwhelming majority of self-described liberals and Democrats: one commentator on CNN recently actually said, when asked about the president’s selection for a successor to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, that he’d choose "a conservative, but a respectable conservative." And of course now that the Iraq election has been proven to be a success, the networks have turned their attention to more important matters, like Michael Jackson’s travails.

Meanwhile, throughout all this, everyday people from a myriad of backgrounds with the ability to think, write, and purchase a web hosting account have supplanted -- or at the very least substantially complemented -- the MSM among those of us who really want to know what’s going on. Information is now truly democratized well beyond even the radio talk show (I could cut off anyone with the push of a button -- though I like to think I exercised that technical sovereignty with care).

Absent any professional standards, any ethics symposia, any profit motive (how does Noam Chomsky explain this?), any power lust, thousands of people have taken to their keyboards to join the growing chorus of citizens weary of the degradation of the MSM. Viewed individually, each blog, and each bit of bad behavior from the MSM, hardly seems to auger historic change. Perhaps that’s why it isn't widely noted that something historic is occurring. However, the institution that many consider to be one of the two or three most powerful in the US is going through very real involuntary change, and that's worthy of history's notice.

Paul Geary is a contributing editor for The New Editor.

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