The Death of the Mainstream Media - Capitol Hill Coffee House

The mainstream media died last week. It wasn't precisely sudden, as they had been critically ill for some time - it's just that it seemed sudden for those who haven't been paying attention. Of course I don't mean that organizations like Newsweek, CBS News, and the New York Times are closing their doors tomorrow - they'll continue to do what they've been doing all along (putting forth opinions, half-truths and a few unsubstantiated stories and calling it "news"). The "death", in this sense, is that no one with half a brain will continue to take them seriously.

The Newsweek "Quran flushing" debacle didn't actually cause this mainstream media death (although it has caused numerous other real deaths and casualties) - no, it is simply the culmination, the coup de grace of a trend that had its beginnings some time ago.

Years back, when Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America" was the anchor of CBS News, people tended to believe the mainstream media, or at least they did for the most part. Of course, now we realize that Walter had an agenda way back then (slanted VietNam war coverage), and the "most trusted" label was grounded more in good PR, and our own naivete as a nation at that time. The press continued on their merry way through the 70's and 80's, gleefully bringing down a sitting president they had despised for years (Nixon), and issuing ominous warnings about how the evil warmonger Ronald Reagan would put us into WW III (of course it was Reagan who ended the Cold War without firing a shot). Many of us knew by then of the leftist tilt of the mainstream media, but it took the 90's, with the advent of conservative talk radio, followed on its heels by the explosion of the internet to truly wake up most everyday Joe Blows. Between the two, it changed the dynamics of how America gets it news and views in a way that would have been unimaginable only a few short years ago.

The monopoly of the mainstream media was broken during this time - the stranglehold they had enjoyed for so long came to a grinding halt. Even their safe haven of television was invaded by (gasp!) Fox News. The truly ironic thing was that so many of these old, venerable institutions, the so-called "leaders" in breaking news, never even saw it coming, and in fact still don't get it today, relying on an ever evaporating public gullibility to further their agenda. If anything, they have reacted by becoming even more slanted and shrill in their reporting than they were in years past. For that reason, they are now dead - dead in terms of public trust, dead in terms of declining viewers and readers.

Because they refused to see the handwriting on the wall, Dan Rather and company chose to run a story using forged documents in an attempt to smear President Bush. Manipulating a presidential election was more important to them than verifying the story for accuracy. Even after that, the media still didn't get it. It's why Newsweek ran the bogus story about Guantanamo Bay interrogators flushing a Quran down the toilet (a physical impossibility not requiring a degree in either rocket science or plumbing to understand). No - publishing inflammatory, negative things about our military and the War on Terror was more important than verifying the story for accuracy. At least 17 Afghans lost their lives, with many more injured because of their sham story. Either the possibility of mayhem in the Islamic world didn't matter to them, or just maybe these crack reporters didn't see that coming either.

The inability to see that the jig is up is part of the reason why the New York Times, et al, continues to run its overblown coverage of Abu Ghraib day in and day out. They seem to think that Americans should be outraged at hearing (for the four-hundredth time) about panties being put on prisoners' heads, but apparently they think we should find none in the acts of terrorists who chop off heads, blow up children, fly planes into tall buildings and the like. Shucks, the Times and others of their ilk won't even call the terrorists, “terrorists”, preferring to use euphemistic terms like "insurgents" instead. At this rate, it won’t be long before they will have transformed the terrorists into “freedom fighters” who were “disenfranchised”. The problem for the Times is that they underestimate Americans, most of whom are quite capable of seeing the difference between a man being made to wear a panty on his head, and a man having his head removed.

The fact is, the so-called "mainstream" media hasn't been mainstream for a long time, and to make matters worse for them, mainstream America is made up of the very people the press bashes. The elitists in the press may look down their collective noses all they wish at "red staters" and their values, but in the end, those values are representative of what the majority of Americans believe and know to be right. In short, the press has forgotten who Americans are, and because they have forgotten, Americans are forgetting them as well - in droves. For the press, that's a fate worse than death.

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