Nat’l Post: ‘You’ll Miss’ The Old Media When Its Gone

MensNewsDaily.com ^ | August 8, 2008 | By Warner Todd Huston

[RogerFGay]

Jonathan Kay of the National Post (Canada) is sure that we'll miss the old media when its gone. So sure he wrote a paean to how great the media is... and he missed the target by a wide margin on every point he made. Unfortunately, he took a good point and made a mockery of the truth of the matter with his wrongheaded reasoning.

In "You'll miss us when we're gone" Kay asserts that the media exists for "a genuine, altruistic desire for an educated citizenry" and hopes that predictions of its "imminent extinction" are wrong. He also claims that there are "certain kinds of important stories that simply cannot be covered, except by deep-pocketed traditional media organizations employing professional journalists." Aside from imagining that the press is at all interested in "education" he isn't too far off the mark here.

We do need the media, at least a media with "deep pockets" that can afford to cover things in some depth and at distance, the distance of the whole globe. Not too many bloggers and new media folks can afford to go about the world interviewing folks and investigating stories. Sure its a small world these days, but boots on the ground is an important thing to investigative writing. So, the old media does serve an important role. It isn't a role that bloggers and new media people cannot do, of course. But it is an important role nonetheless.

But, back to Kay's assertion that the media is interested in "education." They most assuredly are not. What they are interested in is indoctrinating their readers in a certain worldview.

[Owl558]

“Their primary interest is in maximizing the number of readers so that they can command higher advertising rates.”

“I don’t think I agree with you. The media SHOULD be interested in making money.”

I don’t agree either. In a sane world the media would be maximizing their readership and this should be a market-driven recipe for more even-handed reporting. For whatever reasons, they refuse to do this and have chosen to lie about their partisanship. It is obvious, killing them, and good riddence. The issue is their lack of credibility.

[JoJo Gunn]

The Post's site is so processor intensive it almost froze the browser.

As for cretins putting themselves on a pedestal, I wrote the media off forever when they started donning the kneepads on September the 11th of 2001.

[Cacique]

btt

[doug from upland]

We will not miss the NEW YORK SLIMES giving information to the enemy while we are at war.

[SmithL]

BTTT

[Gator113]

“Oh, we’ll miss your traitorous a$$e$ when you’re gone...
With a BIG smile on our faces...”

Ditto to what you said....

[phillyfanatic]

Absolutely. I have been reading their slop since the late ‘40’s. The NYTimes, Post and varied Times’ round the nation have always had opeds which were left leaning and one can go back to Punch’s time, Severeid’s time, Lippmann’s time, Alsop though a brother was much better. It has gone on for so long that likely voters do not know how brainwashed they have been over the last 60 years. I remember the Better Red than Dead opeders. I remember the, ‘who lost China’ debate. Hiss vs Chambers. Helen Gahagen Douglas and all the other lies Left have tried to write and speak to sway American foreign policy.

[Candor7]

What they are interested in is indoctrinating their readers in a certain worldview.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Thats why the media are disappearing. No one wants to read propaganda, spun stories, skewed contexts, omitted facts.

Oh Yez! The audience ahs lived and learned. Liken it!

Our numbers are legion!

[okie01]

I have been reading their slop since the late ‘40’s.

You and me both.

I know exactly what you're talking about. The first fifty years of my life were spent wondering why I didn't agree with the Times, Lippmann, Alsop, et al.

The last twenty years have been spent realizing I was right all along.

[American in Israel]

Their primary interest is in maximizing the number of readers so that they can command higher advertising rates.

While I agree this is what they should do, it clearly is not what they are doing. They have chosen to slant the coverage to pander to the liberal left, instead of Americans as a whole. The big mistake in that is far more conservatives actually work for a living and buy products.

In watching the media circus in Israel it became painfully clear that they have an agenda and are willing to prostitute themselves to force their agenda on the US. There they think they are beyond inspection and lie freely in collusion with each other.

Only problem with that is once you become a liar, you begin to believe your own lies. The coverage got farther and farther off course to the point it no longer passes the smell test.

And you do not buy products from people you do not trust. They mistook their understandings of the world as a mandate to edjumacate the peons, er people and it cost them their jobs.

Good.

[SuziQ]

Since I haven’t watched a morning or nightly news program in years, or read any newspapers, other than the Wall St. Journal for years, I don’t think I’ll miss any of them.

[freekitty]

No.

[GOP_Raider]

"You'll miss us when we're gone"

I wasn't aware they were still here.

[smedley64]

...He also claims that there are "certain kinds of important stories that simply cannot be covered, except by deep-pocketed traditional media organizations employing professional journalists..."

That's the point, moron. We already miss professional journalists, because most of them disappeared long ago, and have been replaced by professional propagandists.

Learn the difference, and maybe you'll realize why most of you won't be missed. The public expects news sources to be reliable, honest, and unbiased. Sorry, but after decades of being nothing of the sort, people have moved on thanks to alternatives which you propagandists no longer control.

Miss you? Bwahahahahahahaha! Hysterical!

[RogerFGay]

National Post is actually a very good paper that has not abandoned professional journalism. I understand your point of view as it applies generally but they are an exception. National Post should definitely be missed if it goes.

[smedley64]

Understood, but Mr. Kay's article seemed to be defending the entire "old media," and he used a story about a NY Times reporter exposing internet trolls as the sad figures they are, to justify the greatness of the entire media. The NYTimes is a pathetic bastion of slanted leftism. Including them in a story about our supposed need to be educated by our media was not a smart move if his point was to show that the "old media" is worth saving.

Maybe he should have defended the few outlets that actually still have journalistic ethics instead of trying to justify what most of the rest of them do based on some idea of "need" that the rest of the world supposedly has for their daily slanted propaganda.