New Media Wins? - Terry

New Media Wins? - Terry Teachout has a great piece on CBS's bailing on their apparent Reagan hack job.

Teachout notes the rather spongy press release CBS used to break the news:

If you were born earlier than this morning, you don’t need me to tell you that CBS decided to pull The Reagans solely and only because of the "controversy." They didn’t give a damn whether it was "balanced." All they cared about was whether enough people would watch the series to make it worth broadcasting—and the firestorm of outrage among conservatives, whom one would assume to make up a large part of the target market for a network miniseries about Ronald and Nancy Reagan, left little doubt that such would not be the case.

The difference? It's a new media story:

I’m sure that everybody and his sister will be blogging about this one, and they’ll mostly be right. Of course it’s a new-media story, and of course it wouldn’t have happened five years ago. I’ve been following Big Media’s coverage of the flap over The Reagans, and just two days ago I noted with interest and amusement a wire story claiming that CBS would be pleased by the controversy, since it would inevitably increase the series’ ratings. That is soooooo last year. Those of us who blog, whatever our political persuasions, know better. Boycotts of Big Media have always been feasible in theory. (Newspapers, in case you didn't know, take cancel-my-subscription-you-bastards letters very seriously—if they get enough of them.) In practice, though, they rarely worked, because it was too difficult to mobilize large-scale support quickly enough. No more. Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative-libertarian sector of the blogosphere have combined to create a giant megaphone through which disaffected right-wing consumers who have a bone to pick with Big Media can now make themselves heard.

It's all worth a read.

Meanwhile, in further news, the NYTimes is considering changing its policy of letting its columnists handle their own corrections. Michael Cox reports that Maureen Dowd's "Ellipsisgate" fiasco has had its effect on the Gray Lady:

Dowd's May 14 column Dowd used an ellipsis to alter (some would say invert) the meaning of a passage in a Bush speech in Little Rock, AR. At that time, we vowed to continue pressing the issue until a formal correction was made. Dowd's response was to randomly insert the full quote into her May 28 column which many, including the TND, deemed insufficient. While Dowd never issued a formal correction, the TND was able to convince newspapers across the country to issue corrections including two papers that wrote editorials critical of Bush based on Dowd's incorrect version of the elided quotation. For a complete account of this matter, readers can jump over to our archives section. The short version is that a number of papers around the country dropped Dowd's syndicated column including The Mobile Register. Michael Marshall, Editor & Vice President of the Mobile Register, wrote to the New York Times in July to register his concerns with the Dowd column and got two unsatisfactory replies from Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins.

Things now appear to be changing. In the wake of the Jayson Blair fiasco an internal commission at The Times, the Siegel Commission, has recommended a number of changes at the paper including the hiring of an ombudsman to advocate for the readers within the Times newsroom. This new "public editor", Daniel Okrent, will be in place on December 1st but appears ready to shake things up at The Times.

Of course, the fact that a paper needs an "Ombudsman" in the first place is a sign that they have a grossly-flawed system in the first place, but never no mind - the real story here is the fact that the Times is changing anything at all.

And where did the Ellipsisgate story take off? On the libertarian-conservative wing of the blogosphere, and talk radio.

(Via Sullivan)

Posted by Mitch at November 5, 2003 06:30 AM