Has The Media Finally Awakened?

I’ve spent 30 years in the business, always cynical about its mission (the business is supposed to attract cynics,) and waiting and wondering if good sense and logic will finally win out over the obvious politics.

Veteran journalists (many now retired) are starting to speak out about what they are seeing with todays “journalists.”

Gawler draws no distinction between Obama and Bush as far as news conferences go, but we’ll leave that one alone for now. At least Bush held news conferences. JFK held one every 16.4 days, and I’m talking about the wide open, “anything goes” news conferences where any question can be asked, not the quickies where 2 people are hand-picked for their ability to fire fluff balls. “Excuse me, you, in the back, from Better Homes and Leftist Gardens.”

Obama has played 10 times as many rounds of golf as he has held news conferences—so don’t say this job is just too tough and he’s too busy.

Even with an adoring media, Obama has struggled at the news conferences he has held. Remember the July 2009 news conference (intended to highlight Obamacare) and Dear Leader was asked about the Cambridge Police incident involving his buddy, Henry Louis Gates. Obama stepped in it by saying the police “acted stupidly” and the Beer Summit was born.

Maybe that’s why Obama news conferences are virtually non-existent. Get this guy off prompter, and you’ve got trouble. He doesn’t even need tough questions being asked.

Back to the media, longtime NBC and ABC reporter Sander Vanocur: “You want to know what’s wrong with the press? The press is what’s wrong with the press.”

The thoughts were pretty much universal at a group of former media folk who met to discuss the 50th anniversary of the first live TV news conference held by JFK in 1961.

Davis added: “I don’t like today’s news conferences” with the president. Kennedy’s, he says, were “thoroughly unrehearsed, natural and they worked to a large extent.” Today’s versions, he adds, “look like they are rehearsed.”

The media are afraid of being shut out. This “transparent” president may smile and look cordial when photographers are around, but in reality he’s more intimidating than Dale Earnhardt was in the rear view mirror. Ask the Boston Herald. You don’t comply, you are shut out.

The media as a group need to stand together or they will fall apart alone. I’ve been in media situations where I’ve been wrongly denied access to a news conference and had others stand with me and walk out. In the end the subject of the interview acquiesced and everybody got what they wanted and the message was sent. It didn’t happen again and apologies were even made by the subject.

It’s important to remember these are former media people speaking out. It’s easy to assume this same current media crop will have an epiphany once they are retired and see how docile they were in covering this White House.

More breaking news to the current crop of White House stenographers, it doesn’t count then. Unless you talk truth to power while they are in power, don’t waste your time.

Hi TSR. The question that tends to go unasked and unanswered is what happened to conservative "media" in this country. For roughly 150 years there was competing press/media, generally separated along party lines. Most of us can remember some larger newspapers in the past identifying themselves in their title as Dimocrat or Republican, more or less liberal vs conservative into the 20th century. Smaller ones identified by party exist to this day. What happened to the conservative/Pubbie press???

I have posed the question on FR several times without receiving a satisfactory answer. I've even asked the Media Research Center to look into this conundrum and some years later haven't seen anything from their research, if any. Oddly enough, or not, as most of us know, this is NOT just an American problem, it is a world wide problem. Somebody knows how and why it happened, no?

>>>Oddly enough, or not, as most of us know, this is NOT just an American problem, it is a world wide problem. Somebody knows how and why it happened, no?<<<

I think I can help you answer this question, after working for two decades in the print and radio media.

First, my personal experience. When I started as a writer a long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Carter was being attacked by swimming rabbits, most of us were already leftists. However, the media was a local affair, and most publishers reflected their own communities. The first few places I worked still had that feeling where you could open the paper on any day and know instantly what the community was really like.

However, that began to change in the 1980s. Chains of papers started building up, per capita circulation was down (it’s not an Internet-era phenomena), and jumping from job to job became the norm. By the end of my career in the middle 1990s, newspapers were owned by folks outside the community who looked at reporters and editors as interchangeable widgets.

Thus, you can open a paper in any community on any day and see the same kind of presentation and news.

The declining circulation, and chain ownership, led to good business sense - buy up your rival and shut them down. Eventually, every town had one newspaper.

Now about that leftist outlook. When you’re reporting for a community, you start to become part of that community. Eventually, you reflect that community’s culture. When a reporter is going from town to town every few years or so, your community becomes the media itself, with its own worldview. That worldview became more and more leftist. Those of us who were conservative were shunted aside, not promoted, or outright fired. For instance, when I was at The Frontiersman in Wasilla in the middle 1990s, a school cafeteria worker called to tell me the Republicans were going to starve schoolkids and eliminate lunches. I investigated and wrote a wonderful story reporting that school cafeteria workers were operating as shills for the Democrats and spreading lies and propaganda about budget changes to school lunch programs. My editor was furious and accused me of trying to be Rush Limbaugh, which I still smile about even now. Nevertheless, within a few months, I was gone. (So was she, when a new chain bought the paper.) However, my readers loved the story. It reflected the community’s political leanings.

Now the broader picture. Look into the Frankfurt School and the idea of cultural Marxism. In brief: communism didn’t take hold in the West because of the strength of culture, specifically individualism and Judeo-Christian ethics. The left needed to remove those barriers, and so they have been every since. Another person to look at it is Antonio Gramscii, who exhorted leftists to make “the long march through the institutions” of communication and culture to change the messages taught to the young and spread throughout the community.

Cultural Marxism has been a great success, sadly. In the emptiness left by eviscerating Western cultural values, the communists can insert newer, better, more socialist values. And so we have Obama.

My response? I became a teacher, and still write every once in a while. I’m doing well in my job as a teacher. More importantly, I’m making the long march through THEIR institutions. It’s an effort I’m proud to make, as socialism tends to kill people and make life a living hell.

Hope that helps.

I missed your reply earlier so a belated thank you for your response. I'm familiar with many of the points you make since I've been following the leftard media with wonderment for the better part of 20 years; maybe longer. During the last 10 years or so I began to ask HOW they were able to pull it off. Like you, I have come to the conclusion there is no single answer. A few points/questions of interest to me:

The AP, primary assimilator of news, is majority owned by the major dailies.

Was/is liberal media more inclined towards sensationalism than conservative media, thereby increasing readership/viewership over straight reporting, particularly in major markets; the cesspools?

Is touchy feely news more marketable than hard news? To some extent FoxNews may belie this notion. What might we infer from that, if anything?

Newspapers especially rise or fall on advertising $$$'s; the evening "news" less so.

How was liberal media somehow able to peel away advertising $$$'s from conservative media; aiding and abetting its demise?

There are more questions but those are a short list that come to mind. Gramsci et al notwithstanding, the mechanism for the takeover of the ministry of information had, and has many moving parts. Do we even know what and where all the parts are? Would it be of any benefit to understand exactly how they were used to infiltrate and subvert media, not just in America, but around the world???

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