Priorities

Top story on the Today show this morning:

Michael Jackson fires his defense team.

#2 story?

Tribute to Pat Tillman

Nice to know the media knows what's news.

Further evidence, I think, in the thread Instapundit was running over the weekend, on the media. There was a time that the media reported the news. Today, it is an institution unto itself.

Jay Reding has a great piece on he subject (which is part of Reynolds' thread):

The media, especially on the national level, is a cloistered and insulated group. If it doesn't appear on the AP newswires, it doesn't happen to them. If a Republican or conservative group does something, there must be a bad angle to the story. If a liberal group does something, it's automatically assumed to be good. The system of bias is pervasive - while the news may be largely corporate-owned, there are few examples where corporate interference skews the news - if anything, there's a demonstrable preference for bashing corporations for "poisoning the air", "harming children", etc. There's an equal preference for government solutions for all problems, from more regulation to new government programs. From the reporters working the field to the editors ultimately responsible for the decision to print a story you have a group of people whose political worldviews are almost entirely homogenous - and this bias shows in the reporting that comes out of news agencies like The New York Times and CNN.

This isn't to say that this bias is all-consuming. If John Kerry were caught in a meaty sex scandal the media would pick up on it (although not after a great deal of vacillation) - after all, sex sells more papers and gets more ratings. Liberals love to use the Clinton scandals as "proof" that the media really isn't liberal, which ignores the fact that the media tried to avoid the story as much as it could in the early days of the scandal, and only flogged it when it was good for ratings, while still providing a certain amount of pro-Clinton spin. The Clinton scandals were not the rule, but the exception, and the treatment of Clinton in 1996 and on other issues was highly preferential.

What does it say about the media - I'm looking at the Today show, but I think it's endemic across the industry - that they're so cynical that they think the news-watching public cares more about Michael Jackson's farce trial than about the war that so many of our friends, relatives and co-workers are overseas fighting right now.

They - the media - seem to live in a world completely unlike the rest of ours. And as internet journalism becomes the news source of choice for more and more of us, it's only going to get worse; the major-media audience will itself become less and less critical, more and more resembling the tabloid media.

That Bush seems to be doing his best to speed the marginalization process is a good thing.

Posted by Mitch at April 26, 2004 07:31 AM