The Plunge and the Surge

More good news from old media. You'd think these old walruses would look around and realize that there are millions of potential customers out here who might buy their product if they would quit ignoring them. They seem to think that citing Fox News' declining ratings proves that leaning more right is an answer, but their perception of FNC as merely a right-wing gimmick misses the point, which is that there really is a large market out here for more evenhanded news coverage, but catering to the more angry part of it isn't exactly the best way to serve it.

The problem is that organizations who see reality only through an Ivy League or San Francisco "progressive" lens don't realize that their view is distorted. I understand that. Whenever I try to read without my glasses, I find it surprising that the letters seem so much bigger, until I remember that they really are that big, and that my glasses make them look smaller in the process of correcting for my myopia. The only other way I can think of to fix my near-sightedness is to replace the lenses of my eyes, or tinker with the corneas or shape of my eyeballs. (I don't know whether any of those could also fix my astigmatism, though.) The point is that I'm aware that what I experience is not necessarily the same as what normally sighted people do. The MSM aren't. They think they're reporting reality and it confirms their biases, but that cart-horse problem is important, and unless they figure that out, they may have to go out of business or be replaced by people who get it.

Old Media bastions of liberalism frightened by the blasts of criticism, and unanswerable criticism at that, are trying to embrace the forms of new media but without the substance. The fact that the New York Times keeps David Brooks on staff as a columnist is not a corrective for "reporting" like this which is demolished by a blog post like this. A casual perusal of Memeorandum's main headings and following a few links to blogs and columns commenting on the original item is enough to demonstrate what I'm saying. There is a predictable spread of opinions among bloggers, but the originating reports are nearly all biased or selectively reported in some way. It doesn't take more than a few scandals like the use of photoshopped pictures and "fake but accurate" documents by major news organizations to make a fair-minded person conclude that these reports are not trustworthy, not complete or both.

And that doesn't even approach the bad logic and condescension in their "analyses."