It’s Not A Fad

Excellent editorial by Mark Belling about the MSM bias:

Mark Belling?s Free Consultation Service For the Mainstream Media (MSM): Stop condescendingly insulting your target audience. Doing so merely alienates them and drives them toward the new media (talk radio, Internet bloggers, Fox News) that actually respects their intelligence and programs for them.

I don?t suspect the above advice will be taken. Instead, members of the MSM will continue to assault their readers and viewers with a barely disguised leftist agenda under the pompous pretense that they are trying to “inform” them. As the audience continues to abandon this heavy-handed rot and instead gravitates toward more satisfying alternatives, MSM wretches will grow ever more jealous and bitter.

Picture Dan Rather holed up in his Park Avenue penthouse. He was going to bring down President Bush with his big National Guard “scoop,” he thought. Instead, the bloggers brought him down. Exposed as a fraud, Rather?s story did in Rather (and actually helped Bush). The unfairness of it all, Rather seethes. Here I am, Dan Rather, finished off by a bunch of Internet bloggers who?ve never even been to Georgetown. Why, they are even conservative!

Nothing drives these has-beens battier than talk radio. A column in this newspaper Saturday by Dennis Shook railed against myself and WTMJ?s Charlie Sykes for “intervening” (Shook?s word) in the election held Tuesday for Waukesha County executive. (When the MSM gets involved in an issue, it?s “reporting.” When talk show hosts offer comment, that?s “intervening.”) Shook is apoplectic that Sykes and I have commented on the very un-conservative past of candidate Jim Dwyer by reporting on leftist stances he?s held over the years. Shook somehow feels these positions are not “news.” Instead, Shook urges readers to read his stories in this paper or, I love this, listen to the debate he moderated.

[…]Former MSM member Jessica McBride (formerly of the Freeman and the Journal Sentinel) is now a blogger. Her old colleagues are apparently aghast that she dares to report on the unending bias demonstrated by her former employers. McBride seems shocked that they?re mad at her. As she is new to this new media/counterculture thing, I?ll warn her that it?ll only get worse. They can?t stand a turncoat.

On the other hand, McBride likely will find a much larger following on her obscure blog than she ever had in writing for the old-line newspapers. The more she dares to present conservative views, the larger her audience will be. The MSM seems unable to grasp this. People are fed up with the monolithic voice of major media. They?re all for higher taxes, same sex marriage, abortion and treating terrorists like shoplifters. They don?t like cops, the military and they especially despise evangelical Christians. Guess what? Very few people share those views. They are looking – no, crying out for – alternatives.

Shook writes that talk radio is “smack talk” and that listening to it is akin to getting hit in the face with a pie. I guess it?s all a matter of perspective. I read his column and imagine a doddering old buggy whip manufacturer sneering at all the automobiles while wailing, “it?s all a fad!”

Guess what, old boy. It?s not a fad. The Web, radio talkers, bloggers and the rest of us party crashers aren?t going anywhere. Your monopolistic game is up. You?re dying and the wound is self-inflicted.

While the MSM may not be dead yet, and may never completely die out as long as there are lazy people who just want to read the headlines and believe everything spewed out from the keyboards of these reptilian creatures.

But the “new media” is gaining strength, and that means the “old media” doesn’t have a monopoly anymore. They can’t announce something and have everyone take it as gospel anymore and that pisses them off.

Hopefully someday we can toast to the death knell of the liberal MSM

Curt

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