The death spiral

AV Westin, Former ABC News Vice-president: "We are in the midst of what I would call the death spiral of broadcast journalism," on CNN tonight. Then he goes on to blame it on cost cutting.

There's an elephant in this room than none of these old pros is willing to say what everybody else sees, CBS's producer and its news anchor were intent on bringing down a president. Dan Rather wanted another notch on his belt. They would never have pursued a story like this that would make Kerry look bad.

Last night on Hannity and Colmes a former head of one of the broadcast networks news division said there's nothing you can do about it. People in these fields are just liberal.

Sorry, that's not good enough. What should be pointed out is that the reason this is so is that these people all come up through liberal journalism schools where they're indoctrinated in the leftist attitudes that dominate Academia. They would deny this vehemently, but the answer is to ask what they think of Fox News. Until they face up to this directly and go out of their way to build diversity of opinion among their reporters, producers and anchors. Journalists will all tell you there's supposed to be an adversarial relationship with officials. In practice, however, they assume that the right thing to do is always to nudge us toward the Democrats.

Brit Hume is an example of a reporter who is smart and tries to tell both sides of every story, but he leans right. The problem was that the news organizations don't seek out more like him to provide balance to their coverage. Nobody can be completely free of bias, with the possible exception of Brian Lamb.

Other guests on Debra Norville's program is Marvin Kalb and Morton Dean. Kalb especially is the height of arrogance, as he mentions blogs and talk radio with distaste, as if he were being forced to say dirty words. The problem is that you can count all the conservatives in the news business on two hands. There's this attitude of superiority that is breathed out especially by the old CBS horses like Kalb and Dean, as if they were monks in some kind of priesthood who are better, wiser and more ethical than the rest of us.

This complaint about how the "bottom line" is driving the slide of the three B networks strikes me as code for saying the people want more conservative viewpoints, which is anathema to them, that serving the market is somehow beneath their dignity. They snort at the mention of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News whom they view as unprofessional, yet talk radio is built around news reporting. It just offers alternative interpretations to those that form the subtext of traditional broadcast news.