def Sparse(Matrix):

Are the big media outlets gambling with the last shreds of their credibility in a hail-mary push to get Obama elected? Instapundit reports on some inside info regarding the MSM’s Obama fetish:

A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: “Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.” I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.

This in and of itself is both expected and frightening. It speaks of an entire industry, or at least its upper echelon, wholly rejecting its first principles of objectivity and honesty for the sake of achieving a political end. This is no longer a matter of unavoidable subjective coloring or periodic lapses of judgment in the crucible of historic events. This is conscious, premeditated and coordinated. The “fourth estate” is no longer a cantankerous and willful extension of the first three estates tasked with service, entertainment, education and criticism. It has now entered a malignant state of open revolt against the first three, or We the People, to the express end of political domination over them. The Press is no longer Us. The Press is now, by their own explicit choice, Them.

Given the steady decline of readership/viewership and the plummeting values of these companies, one would think they are not in a position to make such a bold move. Under normal conditions, the realities of the free market do not allow businesses to express hostile intentions towards their customers and survive. You “give them what they want” when they want it and how they want it. Why then are they so ready to manipulate and insult the only people actually have a say over their future fiscal health?

The answer to that question has been written about quite a bit on the right, so my two cents, inflation-adjusted, are worth pretty much zero. I and most other conservatives expect open hostility towards our chosen candidates. Heck, our current candidate is so weak that it’s been difficult to care about the hostility. The question that’s bugging me now can be prepped best with a quote from the above-linked Instapundit post:

ANOTHER UPDATE: Rand Simberg isn’t so sure: “Where was the backlash against this about Bill Clinton in 1992? They just seem to continue to get away with it.” Well, yes and no. Their reputation and readership/viewership keep falling. And layoffs keep happening. I think they’re willing to pull out all the stops because they realize this is the last election where they have a chance at swinging things this way. No point saving your credibility for the future when you don’t have a future, I guess…

I won’t belabor the point regarding this being the “last election” they’ll be able to affect. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit is famous for his endless cheerleading of the so-called “New Media,” and statements to that effect have been made by him and folks like him for years now. Frankly, I don’t believe that it’s true, per se. The killer pull of that quote, however, is the one I’ve highlighted.

It’s clear that the MSM is acting in a conspicuously bold way in this election. It’s also clear that they’re closing ranks around a particular central narrative, adding to it and adjusting it to suit the reality on the ground as necessary. There is little to no cross-talk among the major media outlets, no competition for uniqueness. Perhaps most telling, no one is struggling for the scoop. Stories are disseminated from the front pages of the LA Times, the New York Times, the nightly news desks of NBC, ABC, etc., and they are all harmonizing.

The only real surprise of the election, the Palin pick, sent shock-waves through big media, to be sure, but those shock waves have not produced the kind of asynchronous punctuations of information that normally come with a completely fresh story. Essentially, the amplitude of the signal was high, as every news outlet cranked up to 11 on the story, but the wave pattern was uniform. It’s almost like every bit of new information went through a central filtering operation before broadcast. The glaring exception to this, I guess, would be the “where’s the bump” fiasco, among a few others, that slipped out early on. Since then, though, there’s been a harmony in the information released that hammers home the narrative from nearly every source in big media.

Here’s the question: If in fact Glenn is right that the media is dooming their future with such a brazen display of message management, what in the world are they going to get out of an Obama administration to justify such a self-destructive act?

They are giving up everything that makes them who they are as journalists to accomplish one last wish. In a way, they are Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down, leaving behind the vehicle of credibility and the clarity of an honest voice to take up the very direct, very ugly weapons of innuendo and outright manipulation to settle the score with a world gone mad, blind to the fact that they’ve given up their souls in the process. In their own eyes, they surely see themselves as just, as action heroes of by-gone days, righting wrongs on the streets of Selma and cleaning up the Cuyahoga River.

The sad reality of it is that they’re just being used by a man and the machine that put him where he is. Surely, once it’s all said and done, there will be some that will wake up to the fact that they played the whore to a Chicago pol and will regret it. They should certainly live with the shame of it, and I know that in my mind at least, I’ve gone from being ambivalent towards the information I get from them to being openly suspicious. I see them as an entity incapable of telling me the truth, of even relaying to me objective facts. Everything they say is said for a reason completely divorced from what used to be called reporting. They seek to manipulate, not to inform.

So be it. Those poor souls are not my concern, though I do pity them.

What about those that know they’re whores and expect payment? What’s that payment going to look like? Obama is no fool. He’s perfectly capable of shutting down opposing viewpoints via legal harassment and outright thuggery. The man grew up, politically, on the meanest of the mean streets of Chicago, showing even in his first election that he’s capable of anything to gain power.

As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.

The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.

“That was Chicago politics,” said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. “Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice.”

I wonder how much choice he’ll leave us if/when he wins in November? Is some kind of omnibus “media fairness” executive order the payoff of the brave new “Age of Barack Obama?”

Hard to know. There have certainly been no reports.

~ by spmat on October 2, 2008.