Dead bodies corrupt because it’s in their nature to do so. When life, the animating principle ceases to be, corruption follows. This holds true for corporate bodies as well, the MSM being a great example.
Truth and dispassionate objectivity are the animating principles of journalism. Reporting the news honestly and objectively, leaving the reader/viewer to discern its meaning and import is the job of the journalist.
Enter the parasites.
Partisan hacks invaded the journalistic body decades ago, driven by a vision of the world and a desperation that admits no truth-telling, no objectivity, no trust in the discernment of the information consumer. What ensued was the steady bastardization of journalism’s virtues, replaced by the ugliness of manipulative lies; both of commission and omission. Then came talk radio, cable TV, and the internet. The new media.
The new media are unfiltered and exist outside of the monopolies of TV’s Big Three and the newspapers. Stories are not only reported truthfully, but often without the constraints of rigid formats or time/length requirements. The result is the presentation of primary source material in support of the story’s assertions.
As bodies with severe parasitic infections are wont to do, they succumb to steady weakening by the ever growing parasitic pathology within. Newspapers are dying. For a time they extended their lives in the lifeboat of online publishing. But, as free online access widened, circulation of papers declined even further. Now, papers such as the New York Times plan to begin charging for online access.
It’s all over.
People will not pay for the privilege of being lied to and manipulated online any more than they paid for the privilege of being lied to and manipulated in print. It says something that Fox News on cable has eclipsed even CNN as America’s most trusted news source at the same time that the electorate lurched left in the past year.
Thanks to Julie C. of Concerned For Life for the following video which demonstrates the extent of media corruption in dealing with the truth of this year’s March for Life. The lies, the manipulation are all there. The decay is moving into the intermediate stage. Judge for yourself.
Coming Home 
Long before partisanship corrupted the papers, money and sensationalism were already at work. “If it bleeds; it leads!” is terrible journalism. A bloody axe murder is not as relevant to peoples’ every days lives as the workings of their local government, but the former is emphasized and the latter is pushed to the back pages. The main agenda is that a sensational cover story sells more papers and brings in more advertisers. It’s as simple as that.
Chuck Klosterman has a really good essay in his book “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs” how some stories get squashed not so much out of conspiracy but out of bad timing….whether the journalist can get the quotes/information they need before the print deadline and whether something more sensational happens in the meantime.
And newspapers just can’t compete with internet news. Internet news is just faster, cheaper/free, and allows for instantaneous reader feedback. The internet also appeals to the short attention spans that most people have today. Newspapers have tried dumbing themselves down to compete and expanding themselves out to offer something unique, but really most people aren’t going to buy the cow when they can get the milk for free.
About half of this is sour grapes, but only half. I’m not sure why any media would cover the march at all. It is a tediously predictable event. We all know that a significant minority of Americans are fervently pro-life, we’ve seen them march every year, we all know that there is a reason, as Antonin Scalia points out, that the Supreme Court are unelected life tenured judges, so they can follow the law, not the immediate popular will. What’s so newsworthy about the event? Everyone who holds a march in Washington for whatever cause offers estimates of attendance larger than reported by either the national park service, or the D.C. police, or the media, and God only knows who, if anyone, is telling the truth.
Now the news people focusing in on a handful of pro-choice people and speculating on who is the larger number, is pathetic. Why do they bother? Public sentiment is not accurately measured by who shows up for a march anyway. Only those passionately committed show up, mostly to get the attention of those who are not. I don’t know why pro-choice people bother — and apparently, most don’t.
But I’m a little shocked to hear you say that the unfettered online media are somehow more truthful and reliable than any previous media. Sure, we all have the option to tell the truth if we care to, or we have the option to tell outrageous lies which will be repeated endlessly until a lot of people believe them. I know to check with snopes, but a lot of people don’t take the time. And Fox News, for all its pseudo-conservative rhetoric, offers the most raunchy, family-unfriendly, deplorable, immoral entertainment available short of pay-per-view, which is probably what drives their ratings.
Does Snopes think that 51% constitutes a majority? That’s the number of Americans who are calling themselves pro-life according to Gallup in May of 2009. Try Googling 51% Americans pro-life and see how well the MSM covered the poll.
Unfettered? We have a First Amendment, who gives the NYT, WaPo et al some kind of right to fetter what others say?
Take their recent non-coverage of the IPCC’s admission that the Himalayan glacier is not melting, the rain forest is suffereing from depredations due to logging, not AGW, and global warming does not exacerbate hurricanes/volcanoes/tsunamis. The London Times, The Daily Mail, and The Telegraph published numerous stories all last week. Did American newspapers take notice? The “unfettered” media online wrote incessantly and linked to these papers.
You really want to read Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion and The Phantom Public. You’ll understand why the MSM is foaming at the mouth at the idea that it has any rival to its authority.
49% of Americans trust FOX NEWS in a Public Policy Poll. Who’s a distant second? CNN! Check out Politic. Compare the number of people who watch Fox’s 6:00 News. The nerwork cleaned the clock of the major networks during the watch on the Coakley/Brown race. They weren’t factoring in the number of people who watch their entertainment channel. If Snopes is telling you that, you need to find a more reliable fact-checker – one that knows the difference between apples and oranges.
As for the numbers at the March for Life. Would you bad mouth the numbers if 350,000 pro-choicers were out there? Why can’t you get that kind of support?
I think Get Religion really handled the under-coverage and misrepresentations in MSM coverage very well, as well as noting some who got it right.
BHG, please try to think a little about what other people are saying, instead of exploding with exasperated exclamations. Gerard used the word “unfettered,” I merely responded to it. His use of it was not inaccurate or uncalled for either. My point was, unfettered media are free to be accurate or to tell blatant lies, and it becomes very difficult to tell the difference. I referred to snopes in general, not in relation to statistics on abortion. One of the few ways to evaluate whether there is any truth at all in an on-line post is to rely on a service like snopes. Whether they are telling the truth is another uncertainty, again offering some reason for caution.
I didn’t question Fox News’s accuracy, although I don’t trust them. I haven’t taken the time to make a detailed study of the subject, so I am in no position to tell you that they are or are not reliable. I mentioned that it is a real contradiction that this “conservative” network, beloved of “family values” conservatives offers the kind of raunchy entertainment that gets people all riled up about “white mice” — i.e. sex and violence. People do tend to watch the news broadcasts of the same channel they get their entertainment from. It is a real mess — there is no pristine purity on the horizon.
You might want to check out the comments from cdx February 1, 2010 at 2:09 am, near the end of the post
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2010/01/the-lost-children/
You’ll agree with Jeff Taylor, the author of the main post, but the stats cdx cites are among the relevant statistics. And ultimately, the possibility that 51% of people describe themselves a pro-life is no basis at all to take away a fundamental individual right to be free from government interference.
SJ,
Actually, Gerard used the word UNFILTERED, not Unfettered.
“The new media are unfiltered and exist outside of the monopolies of TV’s Big Three and the newspapers”
And ultimately, the possibility that 51% of people describe themselves a pro-life is no basis at all to take away a fundamental individual right to be free from government interference.
Abortion is not a fundamental individual right. It is a license.
One of the few ways to evaluate whether there is any truth at all in an on-line post is to rely on a service like snopes. Whether they are telling the truth is another uncertainty, again offering some reason for caution.
Snopes is a biased, blatantly liberal website (owned by a flaming liberal who worships Obama) which presents half-truths and misleading information all of the time.
I would NOT rely on them for any unbiased information regarding anything political, religious, or scientific. It is in NO way a neutral site.
About half of this is sour grapes, but only half. I’m not sure why any media would cover the march at all.
Why not? They cover things like Michelle Obama eating a hamburger, or Obama swatting a fly. Is a march with 400,000 people expressing their views no more newsworthy than that? Come now.
I have no doubt that if somehow the pro-“choice” side were able to muster up 400,000 abortion proponents to protest in the cold, it would be covered by every major media outlet within milliseconds.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Victor Panlilio and ProLifeBlogs, Blogs4Life. Blogs4Life said: #blogs4life Rigor Mortis and the Mainstream Media http://bit.ly/cHXclt […]
SJ,
It’s understandable that one-time events such as the Million Man March (which actually drew 300,000) would get coverage. It’s only in part because of the novel expression of an issue that had been festering.
The newsworthiness really resides in the fact that hundreds of thousands of citizens care enough about an issue that they would take time off from work (lost wages for many) and travel (more $$), many requiring lodging($$) to express their distress over an obvious cancer in the body politic.
The March for Life has NEVER gotten anywhere near the coverage of the other events. That it is an annual event, that it grows in size every year, that the average age of the marchers DECREASES every year is a serious story that is intentionally being ignored by the MSM.
The suppression of the story by the MSM becomes bigger than the event they either choose to ignore, or intentionally misreport.
There are absolutely no sour grapes here. I actually believe that the death of the MSM is because of their self-inflicted wounds.
Once you referred to me as having ‘devoted followers’ here. I corrected you by saying that I have an independent-minded readership. Followers implies disciples. The MSM made the mistake of believing that their numbers were a reflection of discipleship. BIG mistake. The biggest successes in the new media are those who report the truth and back it with objective data.
For every person who was there at the March, there are extended families, church communities, schools and office-mates back home who heard all about it, and wondered where the story was on air and in print.
So, far from sour grapes, I’m loving the disintegration of the MSM. They can’t collapse soon enough.
I don’t think they will collapse at all. They will morph, as everyone has to do at times. For example, I don’t subscribe to the NY Times because they don’t break their subscriptions down into the pieces I want, and its too much to pay for the pieces I don’t. However, if there forthcoming pay policies for the web site are flexible enough — a modest charge for those articles I want to read in full — I would subscribe. I still do subscribed to one or two print magazines.
I’m not at all sure that the biggest successes in the new media are those who report the truth and back it with objective data. Some of the biggest successes, financially, are known for the opposite, but they put on a good show, and while their audience is a minority one, its enough to make millions off of. Neither your site, nor mine, nor anyone else’s is a source of “news.” We’re all spouting our opinions, in a more or less erudite way, with more or less grounding in facts.
As to coverage of the annual March, perhaps a toned down press release, stating the facts you cite here, would actually get some coverage. Instead of expansive commentary laced with righteous denunciation, try a subdued statement that in the last ten years, attendance has grown from XXX to ZZZ, and that the average age of marchers decreases each year. If I were a news editor, and I read the kind of stuff you wrote about “white hot anger,” I’d say, oh yes, hyperbole, they’re blowing their own horn, everyone does. But, if you put forward something of more objective interest, you might snag them. You can still say whatever you want in your speeches, but that’s preaching to the choir and keeping up the morale of the troops. To get the cameras, point out facts they can’t ignore.
(Maybe you should hire me to handle publicity next year.)
The same is the case for the annual Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco. The local news media report, year after year, that there are maybe a “few thousand” walkers. They then give equal airtime to the signs and speeches shown. On one local new stations website, they also posted a 20-minute “behind the scenes” of the pro-abortion sign-holders (some of which included propaganda for totally separate causes–“get out of Afghanistan now!”, “Health-care for all”, etc).
Well, I already have an invitation from Gerard to come to the next march in Washington, which I intend to accept if I can, and if it still stands by that time. I don’t know that I can afford to do both, but some time, when feasible, I would be open to coming west as a neutral observer and then giving you my objective summary.
I offer myself as “neutral” in the sense that I am not a fan of NARAL, for many reasons I have posted here, and I have no constitutional problem with women CHOOSING to carry their fetuses to term, or talking publicly about why. I don’t see any benefit at all to denying palpable facts. I would have a healthy skepticism toward anyone and everyone’s claims about total attendance and relative numbers. However, it could be true, or the truth could be somewhat different than what ANYONE wants to admit, or what most of the media wants to admit.
I know enough about California to know that in the immediate Bay Area, despite a substantial Roman Catholic Church presence, the atmosphere is overwhelmingly pro-choice, BUT, if this is THE west coast march, there are whole counties, lots of them, where substantial sentiment runs the other way. Perhaps the local stations in Merced would have a different perspective to offer than the media in the Bay Area, if they could be persuaded to come check it out.