MSM Loses its Power to Swing Elections
<p>One of the most notorious lines of the 2004 campaign season came to us<br />
in Mid-July when Evan Thomas, the Assistant Managing Editor of<br />
Newsweek, said: &#8220;Let&#8217;s talk a little media bias here. The media, I<br />
think, wants Kerry to win. And I think they’re going to portray Kerry<br />
and Edwards – I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox –<br />
but they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and<br />
dynamic and optimistic and all. There&#8217;s going to be this glow about<br />
them is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them,<br />
that&#8217;s going to be worth maybe 15 points.</p>
<p>Thomas&#8217;s admission validated the charges made in Bernard Goldberg&#8217;s<br />
book <cite>Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the<br />
News</cite>, and capped waves of evidence from recent sociological<br />
studies by the Pew Foundation, scientists at UCLA, and others that<br />
have scrutinized the establishment that the bloggers call &#8220;MSM&#8221;<br />
(Main-Stream Media).  All the evidence shows that the MSM is extremely<br />
left-wing compared to the U.S. population as a whole. Content analysis<br />
has repeatedly demonstrated how this bias both distorts public<br />
perception of specific issues and makes most Americans grossly<br />
mis-estimate where the political center of popular opinion actually<br />
is.</p>
<p>But the reaction to Thomas&#8217;s admission from Republicans and<br />
conservatives was more weary than angry.  They have been wrestling<br />
with the reality of pro-Democrat and left-wing bias in the MSM since the<br />
counterculture wars of the 1960s.  Ironically, however, Thomas&#8217;s<br />
public admission may have come just as the MSM&#8217;s power to reframe issues<br />
and swing national elections was suffering a critical breakdown.</p>
<p>Part of what I&#8217;m talking about the Ra<sup>th</sup>ergate<br />
forged-documents scandal, of course.  It is not yet resolved as I<br />
write, ten days after the original <cite>60 Minutes II</cite> story<br />
and a week after the evidence of crude fakery became undeniable to all<br />
but the most blinkered Bush-haters.  Dan Rather is still hanging<br />
tough, and the editorial position of the <cite>New York Times</cite><br />
is still &#8220;Fake But Accurate&#8221;.  But the longer the holdouts cling to<br />
their forged evidence, the more damage they will take to their<br />
reputations, with effects that will go beyond the current election<br />
cycle.</p>
<p>Just the prompt effects of the scandal are interesting.  The most<br />
obvious one is that John Kerry now seems headed for a Dukakis-like<br />
thrashing in the presidential elections.  As I write, the<br />
anti-Bush-leaning <a href='http://electoral-vote.com/'>Electoral Vote<br />
Predictor</a> website is projecting Bush at 331 electoral votes and<br />
Kerry at 207.  The site notes that this is the most lopsided spread<br />
since it was launched.</p>
<p>There are many reasons besides Ra<sup>th</sup>ergate that Kerry is<br />
losing so badly.  He&#8217;s a pathetically weak candidate &mdash; a lousy<br />
stump speaker with no program and a nearly nonexistent legislative<br />
record, who ran on his Vietnam service only to have that prop knocked<br />
out from under him by former crewmates and superiors who accuse him of<br />
having been cowardly, opportunistic, and unfit for command. In fact,<br />
Kerry has no discernable political base of his own at all; his entire<br />
appeal comes from not being George W. Bush.</p>
<p>But Kerry&#8217;s weaknesses, glaring though they are, are not the<br />
interesting part of the explanation.  It&#8217;s the MSM&#8217;s inability to<br />
cover them up and make them a non-story that is really<br />
interesting. The attempt to present Kerry and Edwards as &#8220;dynamic&#8221;,<br />
&#8220;optimistic&#8221; and &#8220;young&#8221; to which Evan Thomas admitted has mostly made<br />
them look vacillating, frivolous and jejune instead.  CBS, the New<br />
York Times, the Boston Globe and the other centers of the MSM had also<br />
been trying very hard to bury and discredit the Swift Vets;<br />
nevertheless, <cite>Unfit For Command</cite> is now the #1 nonfiction<br />
bestseller in the United States.</p>
<p>Nor were the MSM, despite a visible effort to do so, able to<br />
suppress the evidence that Dan Rather&#8217;s anti-Bush memoranda had been<br />
forged.  In fact, as I write they are proving unable to defend even<br />
the exculpatory fiction that Rather was an innocent dupe. The fact has<br />
come out that CBS was told in advance that two of the six documents it<br />
had were almost certainly bogus by its own examiners, and then witheld<br />
the other four from expert scrutiny and ran with the story anyway.<br />
The implications of that fact are being now dissected not just on<br />
partisan right-wing websites but out where the general public can see<br />
it.</p>
<p>There has been a lot of talk since the Ra<sup>th</sup>ergate<br />
scandal broke that the rise of the blogosphere made all the difference<br />
this time around.  And sharp bloggers fact-checking the mainstream<br />
media made all difference in Ra<sup>th</sup>ergate itself, there is no<br />
doubt about that.  But Ra<sup>th</sup>ergate is only part of a larger<br />
picture that goes back through the Swift Vets at least to the Jayson<br />
Blair scandal, and amidst the peals of blogger triumphalism I think<br />
it&#8217;s time to pull back at this point and get a little perspective.</p>
<p>As an immediate reality check, the bloggers had very little to<br />
do with the success of the Swift Vets&#8217; book.  It is indeed remarkable<br />
that the Swift Vets were able to get their story past the big-media<br />
gatekeepers, but nothing that the gentlemen at<br />
<cite>InstaPundit</cite> or <cite>Power Line</cite> or <cite>Little<br />
Green Footballs</cite> uttered can have had much influence on that.</p>
<p>For a more comprehensive explanation, I think we need to look at<br />
a couple of trends that are larger than the rise of the blogosphere<br />
itself, and which actually drove that rise rather than being driven<br />
by it.  One of these is obvious: the plunging cost of communication.</p>
<p>Before the Internet and cheap long-distance phone calls, pulling<br />
together a cooperative network large enough to produce and back<br />
<cite>Unfit For Command</cite>, or to perform forensic analysis on the<br />
Rather memos, would have been an extremely expensive and long-drawn-out<br />
operation.  The market for ideas had a much longer clearing time then.<br />
In fact it is rather unlikely these sorts of organization would even<br />
have been attempted more than a decade ago &mdash; everybody&#8217;s perception<br />
of the time and money cost would have been prohibitive.</p>
<p>Other forces are in play as well.  One is that people are less<br />
willing than they used to be to derive their identities and a static<br />
set of political affiliations from the things about themselves that<br />
they can&#8217;t change.  Your family&#8217;s politics is a far less important<br />
predictor of your vote than it was a generation ago (which, among<br />
other things, is why conservative talk of a &#8220;Roe effect&#8221;, of liberal<br />
abortion supporters selecting themselves out of the population, sounds<br />
so much like wishful thinking).  Union membership stopped being<br />
predictive sometime in Ronald Reagan&#8217;s second term. Even traditional<br />
racial and ethnic interest blocs seem to be crumbling at the edges.</p>
<p>Increasingly, political power is flowing to consciously-formed<br />
interest groups that arise to respond to individual issues and survive<br />
(if they survive) as voluntary subcultures. The Swift Vets and<br />
MoveOn.org are highly visible examples of the trend.  Internet hackers<br />
organizing against the DMCA and for open-source software is another.<br />
Indeed, the blogosphere as we know it is a voluntary subculture formed<br />
largely from the reaction to the trauma of 9/11.</p>
<p>To people in these subcultures, traditional party and ideological<br />
labels are less and less interesting.  Case in point: Glenn Reynolds<br />
(aka InstaPundit), the pro-Iraq-war, pro-gay-marriage,<br />
anti-gun-control, pro-drug-legalization king of the bloggers.  Is he a<br />
liberal Democrat with some conservative positions?  A South Park<br />
Republican? A pragmatic libertarian?  Not only do Glenn&#8217;s own writings<br />
make it difficult to tell, he seems to determined to flirt with all<br />
these categories without committing to any of them.  Other prominent<br />
bloggers, including those who broke Ra<sup>th</sup>ergate, exhibit a<br />
similar pattern.  The MSM, looking through a left-wing prism, sees it<br />
as conservatism &mdash; but most bloggers despise the Religious Right<br />
and Buchananite paleoconservatism as heartily as they loathe Noam<br />
Chomsky.</p>
<p>Finally, I think we need to look at what bloggers call the &#8220;cocoon<br />
effect&#8221; and understand that it too is a special case of a larger<br />
phenomenon.  Even among bloggers who describe themselves as liberals<br />
there is a widespread sense that the MSM has become a sort of cocoon<br />
or echo chamber, in which left-liberal orthodoxy is shaped by a tiny<br />
self-selected elite and never questioned because no alternatives are<br />
ever permitted a serious hearing. Thus the MSM often experiences honest<br />
shock, disorientation, and disbelief when it is forced into<br />
contact with actual reality.</p>
<p>But it isn&#8217;t just bloggers who notice that cocoon.  So do<br />
blue-collar workers, firearms owners, rural residents, and indeed<br />
anybody who lives in &#8220;red state&#8221; America.  It wasn&#8217;t always like this;<br />
before 1965 or so your average auto-worker in Birmingham and an<br />
editorial-page writer in New York City might have disagreed on much,<br />
but they lived in the same political universe and spoke the same<br />
language.  The Vietnam War ended that; during and after it, elites in<br />
academia, show business, and the media embraced the preoccupations of<br />
the New Left even as heartlanders were rejecting them.</p>
<p>The journalism schools went with them, and the MSM has been<br />
drifting steadily further out of touch ever since.  An index of the<br />
drift is the the way that the degree of trust Americans have in<br />
journalists has plummeted since 1970. Today, survey instruments find<br />
Americans rate journalists lower in integrity and honesty then<br />
used-car salesmen or lawyers.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a commonplace among analysts of American politics that the<br />
dispute over Vietnam has been at the bottom of our culture wars ever<br />
since.  So there is some sort of completion in the fact that the<br />
disconnect between the MSM and the rest of America reached a critical<br />
break while the MSM was attempting to boost on its shoulders John<br />
Kerry &mdash; the man who cofounded Vietnam Veterans Against The War,<br />
who met with North Vietnamese Communists while still a Naval officer,<br />
and who described our involvement there as an extended war crime.</p>
<p>A long-serving governor of Louisiana once boasted that he could not<br />
fail of reelection unless he was caught in bed with a live boy or a<br />
dead girl.  Thanks to Ra<sup>th</sup>ergate, George W. Bush has a lock<br />
on the White House unless he&#8217;s at least as seriously embarrassed<br />
during the next forty days.  Kerry&#8217;s approval ratings are hovering<br />
around 36%.  It seems that the MSM cannot deliver Evan Thomas&#8217;s<br />
15-point swing anymore &mdash; or, if it can, that the left-wing<br />
Democrats&#8217; base has dwindled to 20% of the population or less and the<br />
Democratic National Committee, too long swaddled in the media cocoon,<br />
is in far worse trouble than it understands.</p>
<p>Either way, the self-destruction of the MSM and the collapse of<br />
John Kerry&#8217;s candidacy looks to me like no fluke. It is, rather, a<br />
culmination of trends that have been building for three decades.  The<br />
trend in communications costs is not going to reverse.  Therefore<br />
media gatekeepers will continue to lose power, voluntary subcultures will<br />
continue to gain influence, and the MSM&#8217;s ability to set agendas will<br />
soon be one with the dust of history.</p>
<p>UPDATE: A reader wonders if the MSM ever had the power to swing elections.  The Assistant Editor<br />
of Newsweek thought it could deliver 15%.  Popular-vote margins in Presidential elections have often<br />
been 5% or less.  What does that suggest?</p>
