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