In the 1970’s the big 3 automakers felt invincible. They had a huge monopoly on the cars we as Americans drove for many decades and felt that if they made it, customers would come. What did we get for it? Undriveable pieces of metal.
People began to buy the imports because, well, they were better cars.
Now when it comes to our media we have the AP and Reuters. That’s it. Yeah, there is a few assorted little wire services, but no one uses them.
So what do we get for this monopoly? Bad reporting. Jules Crittenden takes a look at this phenomenon in the Boston Herald and doesn’t like what he see”s:
When a company defrauds its customers, or delivers shoddy goods, the customers sooner or later are going to take their business elsewhere. But if that company has a virtual monopoly, and offers something its customers must have, they may have no choice but to keep taking it.
That’s when the customers, en masse, need to raise a stink. That’s when someone else with the resources needs to seriously consider whether the time is ripe to compete.
The Associated Press is embroiled in a scandal. Conservative bloggers, the new media watchdogs, lifted a rock at the AP.
Curt at Floppingaces, www.floppingaces2.blogspot.com, led the charge. He thought there was something strange about an AP report, and took a second look at it, then a third look. He and others blew the lid off it. The AP is making up war crimes. But the resulting stink in the blogosphere has barely wrinkled a nose in the mainstream press. The ethics-obsessed Poynter Institute seems to be oblivious to it.
[…]The AP, of course, has been delivering unbalanced reports about U.S. national politics for some time, as when President Bush, whom AP reporters despise, is barely allowed to state his case on an issue before his critics are given twice as much space to pummel him. The AP, once a just-the-facts news delivery service, has lost its rudder. It has become a partisan, anti-American news agency that seeks to undercut a wartime president and American soldiers in the field. It is providing fraudulent, shoddy goods. It doesn’t even recognize it has a problem.
At one time newsrooms across the country were filled with vets from WWII and Korea, filled with those who had lived through the depression, basically filled with level headed people who could understand a threat to this country when they see it.
Now what do we get? We get reporters coming from liberal colleges with preconceived biases against the right. They are NOT unbiased, they are not people with their feet firmly planted on the ground. Instead they are moonbats who have no problem doing shoddy work as long as it hurts those they hate…..conservatives.
Jules takes the media to task while Trudy Rubin writes glowingly about them in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
One group of Americans who can be proud of their work in Iraq are the print media correspondents based in Baghdad.
They were maligned by the White House and Pentagon as lazy, biased or worse, but their gutsy reporting turned out to be on the mark. Unlike U.S. officials, these journalists lived outside the protected Green Zone and risked their lives daily. Even as the media were being browbeaten by Donald Rumsfeld, print reporters got the trends right.
In a sign of the times (perhaps the gullible have finally realized Fox News is Fox Spin?), I’m no longer getting reader e-mail asking me to write the “good news” about Iraq.
She spends the rest of the article waxing poetic about the good reporters worldwide while insulting bloggers. She rails against the declining subscription numbers for the print media and blames it all on silly stupid Americans who dare to question the MSM.
A great response to this incredible article comes from Scot Silverstein:
Rather than respond to your Inquirer article specifically, I thought it best to simply remind you that you need to develop the capability to question your own opinions, a key factor in establishing the truths that we in academia pride ourselves on.
Why are you not lending the credibility of your platform in the media to such matters as the LA Times military reporting boycott , the Dan Rather scandal (where Mr. Rather was fooled by risible, supposed early-1970’s fabrications with the fingerprint of a very modern Microsoft Word), the AP fauxtography scandal , the deliberate worldwide media boycott of the 30,000-strong pro-Israel, anti-Ahmadinejad demonstration at the UN, and other media disinformation?
It is likely you have never before seen this material. Many computer-savvy people have. Why is that?
In that regard, consider the possibility that much of what you think you know is wrong. If so, what are the implications? What if the media is biased to such an extreme that it becomes a worse source of propaganda than, say, the government? See “MSM Bias 101” at http://www.mediaright.ca/MSMbias.htm . Study it carefully. The site at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy is also useful in learning how to formulate debate. I’m sad to have to refer journalists to this site as often as I do.
Remember, if your preconceptions are wrong, you may be condemning millions of children (and adults) to death, as occurred in Indochina after the U.S. withdrew – the killing fields were no picnic, after all (nor was pre-war Iraq, See Journal of the American Medical Association article “Exhumation of Mass Graves in Iraq: Considerations for Forensic Investigations, Humanitarian Needs, and the Demands of Justice.” Eric Stover; William D. Haglund, PhD; Margaret Samuels, CSW, JAMA. 2003;290:663-666. (link). Also see Yale’s article about Margaret Samuels at http://www.yale.edu/opa/v32.n29/story4.html and http://www.democracycouncil.org/massgraves.cfm ).
Perhaps journalists need to consider the possibility they have become worse than the governments they criticize for tunnel vision and duplicity. While some of you may think the end justifies the means towards your ideological struggles, you will find that the majority of Americans – who are becoming increasingly aware of faux reporting via the New Media – disagree.
Sincerely,
Scot Silverstein
former co-PI of medical informatics, Yale-Saudi Arabia collaboration in clinical genetics and birth defects.
What the MSM doesn’t understand, or wishes not to understand, is that their response to this criticism should be to tighten their reporting and oversight but instead they rail against us evil bloggers for daring to question their reporting.
Beginning of the end for the MSM…I hope.
Other’s Blogging:
- Gateway Pundit
- Don Surber
- Brutally Honest
- The Jawa Report
- Blue Crab Boulevard
- Hyscience
- Newsbusters
- In From The Cold
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