One of Atrios‘ major themes is impatience with the pace of change in journalism.
Years later with polls being what they are I can’t
believe the media still serves us up
this shit sandwich.
is typical of his oeuvre.
Intellectually I appreciate this. I frequently find myself yelling at the TV while watching Wolf Blitzer in The Panic Room (uh, The Situation Room) or Lou Dobbs claiming to be a journalist when he’s just a former corporate apologist turned nativist.
Today was fairly typical. A long story about Hillary Clinton wearing a low-cut outfit on the Senate floor, with Carol Costello defending her obsession with this nonsense and no one talking about Iraq, except to pretend things there can’t be as bad there as they seem. (They are.)
It’s all nonsense, it’s a defense of lies, yet there is plenty of
historical precedent for all this.
In 1967, for instance, the only
major conservative columnist was James J. Kilpatrick,
who spent most of his career arguing against the normal liberal media
viewpoint. There was legitimacy, 40 years ago, to the charge of a
liberal media. And a generation earlier H.L. Mencken
lasted well beyond his sell-by date. Before that the bloody shirt assumptions of the
Civil War led directly to the Spanish-American War a
generation later.
The point is that editorial boards change slowly. They change even
more-slowly than the U.S. Senate, although less-slowly than the U.S.
Supreme Court. A single off-year election is not going to impose
liberalism on the U.S. press. Two branches of the government remain in
Republican hands, and this Administration has given the media oligarchs
enormous profits in order to maintain the dominance of their view.
Here is how you accelerate the change.
You do it through ratings, and through translating those ratings into
money. Here for instance are the daily audience numbers from Friday for
Bill O’Reilly and Dailykos.com:
So far, O’Reilly still leads Keith Olbermann in his time slot, but the margin continues to decline.
No cable network has yet followed MSNBC’s lead in giving an
Olbermann-like character a showcase. This despite the fact that 70% of
Americans now generally agree with Olbermann, only 30% with O’Reilly.
While I’m certain liberals will call this a conspiracy, it’s not.
A major media company is like a slippery pole. People are constantly
trying to climb up the pole, while others hang on for dear life. To
climb over an existing star you need a rabbi — you need their
approval. So there is every incentive to mirror the stars’ prejudices,
as Costello does Blitzer’s Likudnik views and, say, Casey Wian mirrors Dobbs.
To buck this system, as Olbermann has, you have to be an iconoclast.
There’s no big team around Olbermann, as becomes evident each day he
misses his show. There are a few MSNBC people who seem to want to copy
him, like Allison Stewart,
but it’s the difference between Elvis and an Elvis impersonator. You
can’t clone Olbermann, you can easily replace O’Reilly. (Just go to any
talk radio station.)
What will it take to force change on the major media? The 2008 election
may start the process, if it’s followed by Democratic victories in 2010
and 2012. Pressure from a new Thesis, one which has been validated, to conform will result in new
talent rising which accepts the premises of the new Thesis — openness,
consensus, connectivity.
There are no short cuts. Sorry Atrios.
