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Saturday, October 25, 2008

Why the MSM is Biased

In a previous post, one I don't have time to dig up right now, I wondered if an Obama administration, together with a massive majority in congress, would provide a bailout for the nation's doomed newspapers. Today, the Puppy Blender links to a story by a professional journalist who is appalled by the bias he sees. He closes his article with an analysis of why it's happening.
So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country . . .
Read the whole thing.

4 comments:

  1. Great post. Explains ALOT!

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  2. KT, you're going to want to read this one, too. The post, but especially the comments that follow. I'd say it is the most moving and inspirational post, in may ways - people talking about their values, and how they've had to hide them...

    it's amazing.

    Hope for the post-boomers?

    (inisters)

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  3. Rose, that was a great link! Thanks for sharing that. When I get back from Paso, I'll explore that a little bit more.

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  4. Anonymous4:36 AM

    I don't think this is about why the media is biased, it's more about why they aren't trying to hide it any more.

    Many people can hold strong biases and still deliver facts (this is why you don't see too much political nuttiness in the hard sciences (environmental sciences aren't very "hard") and engineering.

    In the face of diminishing relevance, the MSM doesn't care who sees through their soft bias. They even seem to enjoy the idea of running around naked and screaming their true feelings, even if the Dear Leader will have to disown them for a while ("that's not the MSM I knew").

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