Thanks for your long reply and dedicated work at Free Republic.
Until recent years, I wrote most of my MSM-related posts at NewsBusters.
My own view on journalism...
(1) Most MSM journalists are Hard Left political activists who do a little news gathering in their spare time, mostly by speaking to Hard Left informed sources in government and business.
(2) Most major newspapers and TV news programs don't care if they make a profit - they only worry about breaking even and meeting expenses.
(3) Elite MSM journalists are formidable opponents - they are gifted writers, gifted and attractive speakers, highly paid, highly creative, they are tireless workers, and they are absolutely passionate about their Hard Left political principles.
(4) Elite MSM journalists have no understanding of one of their most critical advantages - they are completely de-centralized - this means they can experiment with new political themes or emphasize new news stories much faster and much more creatively than Conservative candidates can respond to them - and, as you point out, there is no downside risk - if one elite MSM journalist advances an ineffective theme or story, all the other elite journo's just ignore it - if the new theme or story is effective, all the other elite journo's leap on board and add new details or new perspectives.
(5) How do Conservatives fight this? - great question - sometimes I think our growing presence in “New Media” like Free Republic is the answer - other times, I feel despair and completely powerless against the crushing influence of the Hard Left MSM.
I have a dream, as Dr. King famously put it. The advantage of focusing exclusively on journalism, which claims both truth and objectivity, is that at least in retrospect their claims should be subject to falsification. And as I noted in Why Broadcast Journalism is Unnecessary and Illegitimate, broadcast journalism is regulated by the FCC and is purportedly in the public interest. But ifit would seem that it should be possible to sue the AP and its membership, the broadcast networks and their member stations, and the FCC for malfeasance/nonfeasance in their stated missions. I saw a web site which credibly asserted that SCOTUS found the AP to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act back in 1945. I’d cite the link, but it’s broken now. In 1945 the mission of the AP - the conservation of scarce, expensive bandwidth in the long-distance transmission of news - made the AP clearly too big to fail in 1945. In 2011, tho, long-distance telegraphy bandwidth is dirt cheap, and you could imagine a lawsuit demanding the breakup of the AP.
- journalism systematically fails the test of retrospective truth,
- journalism systematically fails the test of objectivity, and
- journalism systematically operates as a cabal conspiring against the public,
Anyway, it’s a nice dream.