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