This morning Glenn Reynolds asked if the Mainstream Media, in the wake of the Newsweek fiasco, has reached a tipping point. The recent Connecticut study on attitudes toward the media suggests we have already reached a point where the Media is less trusted than the government. As someone who came of age in the '60's and agrees that the government (more specifically, the President and the military, especially) is more likely to be truthful than the MSM, I must say we have come to a remarkable pass. How remarkable is worth reflection.
I plan on offering some thoughts on the reaction of the Islamic "Street" to the Newsweek article in a later post (though things keep derailing my intent) but for now I am more interested in the media.
As I have made clear, I think a free press, and an inquiring press, is a necessity for our democracy to function well. It may be possible for the blogosphere or some other arrangement of "citizen" journalists to eventually replace the MSM, but it does not seem likely that in the near term we will have the wherewithal to do so.
Newsweek committed a number of serious transgressions with its story of the "Flushed Koran". It failed to adequately source the story, it failed to recognize the consequences of running the story, and it failed to question its assumption that anything that could be known should be printed.
This leads me to a discussion I had with a couple of co-workers this morning.
I spend several hours a week in a community mental health clinic. The staff consist of a diverse cross section of New York on the Upper West Side. They tend to be reflexively liberal, supportive of entitlements (the motto of the clinic is "Health Care is a Right, not a Privilege"), almost uniformly Democratic party down the line. When I walked in this morning, the first question addressed to me by the Hispanic Security Guard and echoed by one of the Secretaries, was, "Is this the end of Newsweek?" As a rule I rarely discuss politics with other professionals, since they seem to be somewhat intolerant of my lack of liberal orthodoxy, but the support staff at the clinic, who are middle class, with aspirations for themselves and their families that would be familiar to most, tend to be more open-minded even when they disagree with me. They may not be as sophisticated as the writers at Newsweek and the MSM, but they can smell a distortion when they see one (sorry for the fractured metaphor.) Since my co-workers are exactly the types of people who the liberal MSM claim to speak for (generally the MSM speaks for people as members of identified groups rather than as individuals) this struck me as a telling question.
Dr. Sanity made an excellent point this morning. In response to my last post, From Adolescence to Adulthood: Responsibility, she wrote that she sees little evidence that the MS will one day "grow up":
No, sadly, the MSM seems completely unable to learn from their mistakes, because the first thing that needs to happen is that you have to recognize you have made a mistake in the first place. That's the glitch. Psychological insight and growth can only occur when you are willing to honestly admit your mistakes, and evaluate why you did what you did.
Did you know that Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were just given the Peabody Award for excellence in journalism? Does that sound like any lesson has been learned?
If anything, the MSM is locked in a perpetual adolescence and will continue on its tiresome, irrational and self-destructive quest in the hopes that the next breaking news story will finally bring down their nemesis--the Bush Adminsitration.
While the metaphor of the MSM as adolescent is appealing, both of us recognize that it is just a metaphor; that being said, I do believe we can carry it a little further. An adolescent grows up, ie learns to deal more appropriately with reality and accept an adult's limitations and responsibilities, in part by having external limit setting from caring parents. We do not let our 15 year old stay at a friend's house when their parents are out of town because we know a teenager lacks the judgment and confidence to deal appropriately with various temptations. Even when we have the utmost confidence in our own child, we would be derelict to test their abilities in such a way. When our 16 year old misbehaves, we take away the car keys. By 17 and 18 our leverage is quite limited but in the extreme case of a youngster who refuses to abide by our rules, we can ask them to leave the house.
The MSM is in an analogous position. When they are irresponsible, we can cut off their allowance; many people have been canceling their subscriptions to various publications. Advertisers, in response to falling numbers and irresponsible reporting, have been cutting their Ad buys. We are rapidly approaching a time when the MSM will be faced with changing their approach ("growing up") or being asked to leave the house and fend for themselves (in a perpetual adolescence). Newsweek may be able to survive as a niche magazine. It can continue to feed on fantasies of recovering its youth and bringing down another corrupt government just as it did when it was in its heyday 30 years ago, but it has already lost the trust of a majority of Americans who simply no longer care what they think or write.
My hope is that some of the MSM come to recognize how their own biases and arrested development have brought them to this pass (ie, gain some insight); perhaps part of the MSM can be salvaged. A responsible, progressive counterpart to Fox news would be helpful to our discourse; but I'm not counting on it.
It will be interesting to see if there are any editorial changes in the MSM in the next 2-3 months.
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