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