PrintSeptember 15, 2009
Eviscerating old media pomposity
The old media power structure is crumbling in the face of information provided by newcomers to the media scene. Instead of competing more vigorously, the old media disparages the newcomers. But a succession of stories which come as a complete surprise to those who get their news from the likes of the New York Times and NBC is making laughable this pompous disparagement.
Jeffrey Lord of The American Spectator demolishes the credibiltiy of Tom Brokaw and Tom Friedman in their recent denunciation of the internet on Meet the Press. Both men bemoaned the lost era of mainstream media gatekeeping. Lord goes over some history of media malpractice by the biggies who used to decide what American did and didn't learn about their leaders.
There is no possible defense from the likes of Friedman or Brokaw to the litany of misbehavior Lord lays out, so you can be sure neither one will ever engage in debate with Lord or any other serious and informed critics. The will, instead, retreat to their steadily home turf, telling their steadily diminishing audiences that they should pay no attention to those louts who provide inconvenient truths about liberalism. A lot of good it will do them. Lord notes:
Americans have learned the hard way that there was and is a serious effort by some of the most powerful figures in American journalism to quite deliberately keep Americans from making "informed decisions" by denying them accurate information. [....]... across five decades of American journalistic history, the instinct of many Old Media institutions -- specifically including NBC and the New York Times -- has been to deliberately withhold the truth. To quite deliberately use their journalism skills and tools to misrepresent those whose politics they do not favor.Were this, say, the field of medicine, practitioners of this kind of thing would lose their license to practice, sued for and surely convicted of malpractice. As it is, the examples listed here are what might be termed "media malpractice," evidencing a clear and convincing pattern of deceit.
Hat tip: Lucianne.com
