Mainstream Media Bias

Franklin Foer at The New Republic warns liberal bloggers to go easy on the mainstream media (MSM):

(T)hey don't deserve the savage treatment that they routinely receive in the blogosphere. The problem isn't just that they have been flogged by bloggers desperate for material. It's that the blogosphere nurses an ideological disdain for "Mainstream Media"--or MSM, as it has derisively (and somewhat adolescently) come to be known.

...You would expect this kind of populism from the right, which long ago pioneered the trashing of the MSM, or, as Spiro Agnew famously called its practitioners, "nattering nabobs of negativism." ...(The Right wants) to weaken the press so it will stop obstructing their agenda, a motive that liberal bloggers seem to have forgotten. By repeating conservative criticisms about the allegedly elitist, sycophantic, biased MSM, liberal bloggers have played straight into conservative hands. These bloggers have begun unwittingly doing conservatives' dirty work.

What they're attacking is the MSM's Progressive-era ethos of public-minded disinterestedness. By embracing the idea of objectivity, newspapers took a radical turn from the raw partisanship that guided them in the nineteenth century. "Without fear or favor" was Times owner Adolph Ochs's famous phrase. That "objective" style worked well for many years, because, in the postwar period, political elites shared broad assumptions about policy with one another--and the media. But the Bush administration has violently rejected that consensus. And, instead of playing by the old rules that governed the relationship between reporters and the White House, it has exploited them.

...But, after examining the news media's failings, many liberal bloggers still conclude that the system is beyond repair. They have begun to dismiss the MSM as doomed avatars of the ancien régime. Atrios, one of the most popular of the liberal bloggers, recently threw up his arms: "If idiots destroy institutions there's no reason to continue to respect them." (Their derisive attitude resembles nothing more than the New Left, which charged journalism with dulling the sense and sensibility of the masses, preventing them from seeing the horrors of the capitalist order.)

The mainstream blogosphere (MSB) is only too happy to bury the old media regime, because it has an implicit vision for a new order, one that would largely consist of ... bloggers.

...This model stinks for countless reasons. But its most fundamental flaw is that bloggers will always be dismissed by their opponents as biased.

...There's another reason that liberals shouldn't be so quick to help conservatives crush old media. Because of the right's alliance with business, it simply has more resources to shovel at its institutions--and it has been doing exactly that for the last 40 years. And, unlike liberals, conservatives have already proved themselves masters of partisan media, where they reduce their political program into highly saleable, entertaining populism. If the battle of ideas doesn't have credible, neutral arbiters like the so-called MSM--and liberals jump into an ideological shoving match with bigger, badder, conservative outlets--there's no question which side will prevail.

That pushed me over the edge:

"For starters, there was the 2000 campaign, in which the press presented Bush as essentially the heir to Clintonian centrism...." That was the MSM's work, Mr. Foer: a pretty piece of absolute pro-Bush bias. So why blame the bloggers for complaining about it?

Bloggers don't want to replace the MSM: we want the MSM to do its job. If the MSM wants to cater to power, so be it, but then don't expect us to read your rags anymore. Sure, big business can throw resources into media, but until they drug the populace, they can't force us to consume their crap. I've given up Cable, TNR, and this week, the NY Times, because, as a literate person, I'm tired of your games. If I have to, I will run my own press. I'm not alone! The hell with the MSM (and that includes TNR too!)

Todd Gitlin gets it, though. Referring to The New York Times' Judith Miller:

"WMD --I got it totally wrong," Miller told the Times’ Don Van Natta Jr., Adam Liptak, and Clifford J. Levy, who wrote the paper’s long overdue self-study on October 16, 2005. "The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong."

These sentences deserve the closest of parsing. "The analysts, the experts" were not all wrong -- David Albright wasn’t, for one, nor were various State Department and Energy Department officials mentioned in passing by Miller and Gordon without citing any reasons for their dissent. "The journalists who covered them"? Knight Ridder’s Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel were right. The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick was right, though his important piece, under the headline "Evidence on Iraq Challenged; Experts Question If Tubes Were Meant for Weapons Program," ran on page A18 on September 19, 2002.

The key to Judy Miller’s cri de coeur lies in her repeated alibi that the journalist is only as good as her sources. But sources, like WMDs, do not grow on trees ... A journalist chooses them. Miller -- and her superiors -- fail to consider that her sources opened up to her precisely because they found her sufficiently reliable, meaning credulous. "My job," she said in a 2004 radio debate with Massing, "was not to collect information and analyze it independently as an intelligence agency; my job was to tell readers of The New York Times, as best as I could ?gure out, what people inside the governments who had very high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not have in the area of weapons of mass destruction." No wonder Massing told me: "From her stories, it seems clear to me that she had an ideological agenda and went out to ?nd information that would support it."

...(W)hat lessons have the nation’s news proprietors learned?

Not many. Our top newspapers seem to think that, in an age when they are under 24-7 blogger scrutiny, they can still purify themselves with ease, if embarrassed ease, by banishing Miller and slapping Woodward on the wrist. But top managers at the Times and the Post are clueless about how much respect they’ve lost. How did they miss ?rst the WMD hoax, then the White House’s Wilson-baiting and CIA-baiting cover-up? How come Knight Ridder didn’t miss those stories? What does their team know about covering Washington that the huge Times bureau doesn’t?