R.I.P. the mainstream media as a covert de facto political party.
That’s essentially what Newsweek’s Howard Fineman writes in what is basically an obit for the mainstream media as we have long known it.
But his excellent piece represents even something BIGGER:
It’s an obit for what during the 60s and 70s was called "advocacy journalism" — where journalists began to take firm stands, almost like editorial writers. Slowly this began to creep more and more into daily event coverage — until we reached the end of the 20th Century…where you never heard the phrase "advocacy journalism anymore."
Why? Because much of the coverage offered became put within a context that in ITSELF was "advocacy journalism."
A few key chunks from Fineman with our comments (this needs to be read in full):
WASHINGTON – A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don’t mean the Democrats. I’m talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush’s Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the Internet and Fox’s canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.
I would personally emphasize "its own fraying journalistic standards." It’s truly shocking how far down American journalism has plunged in terms of story selection, use of "news hole space," the emphasis in personality over nuts-and-bolts-issues, the pack journalism behavior with the work-day prison of the need to beat everyone in an increasingly endless news cycle, and de-emphasis of vital issues that may not be dramatic or visual. More:
Now the AMMP is reeling, and not just from the humiliation of CBS News. We have a president who feels it’s almost a point of honor not to hold more press conferences — he’s held far fewer than any modern predecessor — and doesn’t seem to agree that the media has any "right" to know what’s really going in inside his administration. The AMMP, meanwhile, is regarded with ever growing suspicion by American voters, viewers and readers, who increasingly turn for information and analysis only to non-AMMP outlets that tend to reinforce the sectarian views of discrete slices of the electorate.
Fineman notes that the idea of a neutral "mainstream media" took hold after World War II, then writes this:
Still, the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it’s pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things. The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded in good measure (and ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS’s star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon’s fate as the first president to resign.
He recounts the history of how the press got more and more involved in advocacy journalism. But, he writes, by taking sides "a party was born."
And, he writes, this happened around the time the Democratic party had an identity crisis. He then traces the growth of the GOP’s new media savvy attitude: how Ronald Reagan, GOP activists and others figured out how the mainstream AMMP worked and figured out ways to circumvent it and its message out.
His conclusion:
In this situation, the last thing the AMMP needed was to aim wildly at the president — and not only miss, but be seen as having a political motivation in attacking in the first place. Were Dan Rather and Mary Mapes after the truth or victory when they broadcast their egregiously sloppy story about Bush’s National Guard Service? The moment it made air it began to fall apart, and eventually was shredded by factions within the AMMP itself, conservative national outlets and by the new opposition party that is emerging: The Blogger Nation. It’s hard to know now who, if anyone, in the "media" has any credibility.
And, as Walter Cronkite would say, that’s the way it is.
Ahhhhh…all is not that bleak:
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Blogs are a new form. The overall personality of Blogtopia has yet to emerge. Right now it’s emerging via individual issues. Each time a crisis or controversy pops up, blogs respond to that one in a certain way.
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The big question for blogs is whether in the end they’re going to become the lapdog doing an obscene political lapdance at the service of either the Democrats or Republicans. Or will they — despite the party affiliation of each blogger — retain a fierce independence.
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There are already signs newspapers are adjusting to the Internet.
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There needs to be a GENERATIONAL SHIFT and until then the next phase in the Mainstream Media really won’t be known. I went to journalism school fired up by some of the journalism I saw as a college student. Blogs, instant response, and instant vetting didn’t exist because there was no Internet. How will this new informational context influence those who have yet to begin to assume influential spots in the news delivery business?
BOTTOM LINE: If Fineman is writing an obituary, the form of the mainstream media represented by the behavior of the CBS bigwigs — and Dan Rather — in the Memogate crisis deserves to die. It acted in a way that violated basic journalistic practices, dug in its heels and undermined its own credibility.
Life always goes on. So will the mainstream media but — as we move further into the 21st Century — it may evolve into a slightly different form.
THIS JUST IN: Be sure to catch the Outside The Beltway Traffic Jam.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.