The Journalist as Herd Creature
<p>In September 2004, well before the elections, I wrote an essay on<br />
the <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=154'>collapse of<br />
mainstream media influence</a>.  I predicted that the Rathergate<br />
scandal and the Swift Boat Vets would lock up the election for George<br />
W. Bush, despite the MSM&#8217;s most determined efforts to get Kerry into<br />
the White House. I related this to a long-term decline in MSM influence as<br />
plunging communications costs erode its gatekeeper role, and predicted<br />
that decline would continue.</p>
<p>(For anyone who came in late, &#8220;MSM&#8221; is how bloggers abbreviate the<br />
&#8220;mainstream media&#8221;.  But that term is imprecise, because the category<br />
actually excludes the contrarian/conservative but mainstream Fox News<br />
and includes certain niche media outlets such as National Public<br />
Radio.  What MSM really refers to is what I have sometimes called the<br />
&#8220;dominant media culture&#8221;.  The centers of this culture are the New<br />
York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, ABC,<br />
CBS, NBC, and CNN.  The MSM peddles news made by and for elite<br />
bicoastal liberals.  One conservative commentator has aptly <a href='http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/087nhhbq.asp'>described</a><br />
the MSM as an &#8220;echo chamber of left and further-left scribblers and<br />
talkers and self-reinforcing head nodders who were overwhelmingly<br />
anti-Republican, anti-Christian, anti-military, anti-wealth,<br />
anti-business, and even anti-middle class&#8221;, which indictment could be<br />
dismissed as political ax-grinding if sociological studies by the Pew<br />
Foundation and others had not consistently shown journalists and<br />
editors to have exactly the voting and political-contribution patterns<br />
that description would suggest.)</p>
<p>Two months later, my predictions appear to have been correct, and<br />
have been repeatedly echoed in postmortems by Democratic political<br />
analysts.  The wailing and gnashing of teeth in the MSM has been loud.<br />
The latest eruption is from Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis<br />
Star-Tribune, in which he <a href='http://24hour.startribune.com/login/?goto=http://www.startribune.com/stories/357/5158765.html'>frenziedly<br />
attacks</a> the editors of one of the blogs that helped break the<br />
Rathergate scandal.  Coleman has been quite properly slapped around<br />
for his frothy, hysterical. ad-hominem rhetoric by both his <a href='http://powerlineblog.com/archives/009062.php'><br />
targets</a> and many other bloggers (<a href='http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4135'>here</a><br />
is one representative shellacking).</p>
<p>Coleman&#8217;s anger so possesses him that he stoops to casting<br />
aspersions on an opponent&#8217;s genital adequacy.  But spare him some pity<br />
along with your condemnation, because his rage transparently<br />
springs from fear &mdash; the fear that he&#8217;s being beaten at his own<br />
game of opinion-molding by amateurs, by bloggers, by (worst of all)<br />
<em>Republicans</em>.</p>
<p>What Coleman is acting out on an individual level is the same rage<br />
and fear that is rippling through the entire MSM.  This rage and<br />
fear has three causes, intertwined but distinct and all readily<br />
discernable in Coleman&#8217;s rant.</p>
<p>First, the MSM is reacting badly to its loss of power.  Few people<br />
would claim now what <em>Newsweek</em> editor Evan Thomas did less<br />
than six months ago, that the MSM can swing a national election by 15<br />
points in the direction it wants &mdash; not when the 2004 elections<br />
swung by at least three points in the direction it <em>didn&#8217;t</em><br />
want.</p>
<p>Second, the MSM is acting from a genuine fear of the social<br />
consequences of the loss of its power.  Many of its influence leaders<br />
genuinely believe that conservatives are evil thugs bent on plunging<br />
the world into a theocratic, imperialist dark age, and that it<br />
is their job to fight the good fight against this.</p>
<p>Third, they are most terrified of all at discovering how out of<br />
touch they are.  In the past, your typical MSMer surrounded by other<br />
MSMers has believed that he is mildly &#8220;progressive&#8221;, merely holding<br />
the opinions that all reasonable people hold and opposed by at most a<br />
tiny and dismissable fringe of kooks and rednecks.  MSMers are more<br />
undone than anything else by the discovery that the mainstream of the<br />
American population is rejecting them in droves for Fox News, talk<br />
radio, and the blogs.</p>
<p>The first two causes induce fear, but I think it&#8217;s the third one<br />
that tips it over into irrational panic.  Almost all the working<br />
journalists I&#8217;ve ever met (and I&#8217;ve met boatloads of them) are herd<br />
creatures &mdash; they may talk about individualism and subverting the<br />
dominant paradigm, but they have a very strong need to believe that<br />
they&#8217;re &#8220;of the people&#8221;, simply writing the things that 99% of the<br />
people would think and write if they were capable.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a short step from this belief to Coleman&#8217;s flavor of<br />
quasi-paranoid ranting.  Anybody who doesn&#8217;t think like the MSM cannot<br />
be authentic, but must instead be a paid or suborned tool of evil<br />
forces. Watch for this theme to show up more and more frequently in<br />
the next year as most of the MSM sinks ever-deeper into denial.</p></p>
