Fox's triumph was one of a handful of intriguing media stories to emerge from the GOP convention -- including a resurgent MSNBC, sagging CNN and the fading influence of the broadcasters.
it's time to examine the cracks in the wall of the monolithic media.
In 1989 when the Berlin Wall was literally torn down with sledgehammers the pictures came as a surprise to most in the U.S. There simply had been no media stories of the desperation of the Soviet Union, itself on the verge of complete collapse, or the de facto collapse of East Germany. Most Europeans seemed to know beforehand of the momentous symbolic event that demonstrated the end of the Cold War -- the destruction of the Berlin Wall. One sympathetic eyewitness wielding a hammer observed, "The wall was made of cheap, brittle concrete: the Russians had used too much sand and water."
It was a facade, a wall of political division deliberately inflicted, a symbol of cruelty, hurriedly constructed to hide East German poverty from public view, the cracks in Communism.
Papering over the cracks
Today the media is engaged in the same subterfuge to paper over the gaping cracks in the media monopoly. Like communism, Liberal media cannot compete. Like communism, the Utopian dream has turned to totalitarian methods to stifle dissent. Political correctness purports to preserve sensitivity by eliminating debate. Speech codes on campus codify the outlawing of dissent. Of all of them, shutting out any recognition of other viewpoints with a stacked newsroom 90% Democrats by definition, driving out competition, hiring "diversity" journalists to self-censor the newsrooms to the correct viewpoint, the newsroom culture that rewards dishonesty is the most egregious. Howard Raines did not resign because of one dishonest reporter. He resigned because the New York Times had been publicly caught faking news. USAToday was similarly caught and an entire tier of management and editorial staff was fired, the final report laboriously detailed to proclaim innocence of the very thing they noted -- a newsroom culture of bias. They left out the "of bias" but it was elaborately chronicled in ten parts, no less. Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley were the fall guys handed over for public hanging, but the newsrooms that created them, tolerated them, promoted them, embraced them as their new generation of the "brightest and best" remains. Fraud in circulation figures that even industry insiders worry are more widespread than those currently exposed indicate a media meltdown.
The more marginal the media become the more marginal their sources
This is where the media collapse is most apparent. Partisanism in the newsroom isn't new. The exposure of the bias is just higher visibility. You only have to watch the ranting of Chris Matthews and compare it to his ratings to realize that the only place this kind of flagrant fanaticism is tolerated is in market areas dominated by journalists themselves. In essence, they are preaching to themselves, a kind of rally-the-troops boosterism you find at Jim Romenesko's blog at Poynter.com For the rest of the country, it is a complete turnoff. Even journalists are becoming worried. Yet the media continues the pretense that Meet the Press is relevant, that Matthews is informed, unbiased, and a "tough interviewer" despite softball questions for Liberals that makes Larry King look like a police interrogator with a rubber hose. As a result, their coalition of the willing to be lied to increasingly includes the bizarre, the demented, and the outright nuts whose press releases substitute for thoughtful, unbiased journalism. They have become vanity presses for the disaffected.
Newspeak when truth is no longer a viable reality
When the media is so self-involved in the Palestinian cause as a tool to bash the West and wage a proxy war against the United States to facilitate a rise in Internationalism they hope to dominate that they are reduced to labeling Chechen terrorists as "hostage takers" to avoid the obvious, it's time to call it what it is: newspeak to avoid reality, obscure the obvious, and avoid the inevitable conclusions.
Plagarism and outright lies are symptomatic of the disdain even their employees have for their media employers. Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for her complete fabrication. The fraudulent stories aside, the insertion of "boos" for Clinton's health most recently that the AP quickly changed to "Ohhhhs" when audio tape was produced meant the AP had to alter the Lexis-Nexis database to change history. David Shaw, the once respectable media critic for the Los Angeles Times urges the media to be "filters for truth" to eliminate any truth deemed unacceptable. Meanwhile, Shelby Coffey, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times is reviewing two books on journalism. Coffey who once banned 150 words deemed incorrect, words that would not appear in the newspaper, an act laughed at in his own newsroom and immortalized by a hilarious piece by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, went on to unmemorable posts at CNNfn then ABC. His style guide was forgotten the day he left the door, the newspaper so impoverished intellectually and financially that eventually it had to be sold to the Chicado Tribune.
None of these cases are particularly new, the collection of them is. The media used to have a monopoly on memory -- those stories they dredged up and collated and printed to make a point. Other stories inconvenient for the agenda were forgotten. With Google, the poor man's Lexis-Nexis, bloggers are able to amass the same resources to buttress their arguments but with a self-correcting mechanism the mass media does not possess. Bloggers are quick to catch other bloggers and the existence of an opposite viewpoint anxious to discredit make the news competitive and the free market of ideas more exciting than anything since movable type was invented. Bloggers are even quicker to note, catch, record and gather information about media fraud and deception, which takes the media closer to total collapse.
Competition from FOX, the blogosphere, the Internet in general, talk radio, and a break in the book publishing monopoly and book distribution monopoly have all helped batter the walls of the media. But the core problem is the media itself. It's the choices they made and continue to make. For them, it isn't a question of power and influence or money. It's a commitment to an agenda that is profoundly anti-American at the core, anti-democratic at heart, and dishonest to the soul.
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