“…across five decades of American journalistic history, the instinct of many Old Media institutions — specifically including NBC and the New York Times — has been to deliberately withhold the truth. To quite deliberately use their journalism skills and tools to misrepresent those whose politics they do not favor.

Were this, say, the field of medicine, practitioners of this kind of thing would lose their license to practice, sued for and surely convicted of malpractice.
–Jeffrey Lord, “Media Malpractice: Tom Brokaw’s World Implodes”

* Big News Media Sells a Defective Product
* Less People Willing to Settle for Less News
* In the Absence of Trustworthy News from Traditional Sources, People Look Elsewhere

To mark my return to DBKP, I was going to compile a list of Big Media cover-ups and Waterloos –call it Media Malfeasance–of the last several months. To my pleasant surprise, Jeffrey Lord of American Spectator already had done the work [Media Malpractice: Tom Brokaw's World Implodes] and published it this morning.

Lord’s listing of the Establishment Media’s sins over the last 50 years is hard to beat and is One Reason More Americans Believe in UFOs than Trust the MSM.

One sample:

On the verge of being nominated for president on the Republican ticket, Senator Barry Goldwater is, says CBS journalist Daniel Schorr, heading to Germany for a vacation after the GOP Convention. Germany? Why Germany? The trip was, said reporter Schorr, “a move by Senator Goldwater to link up” with the far right-wing of German politics. Meaning, of course, the Nazis. Goldwater would not only be consorting with these Nazis, he was scheduled to stay at Berchtesgaden, the infamous country estate of Adolf Hitler. In fact, Goldwater had no such plans. None. Zero. Zip. But it was a vivid story that successfully added a few brush strokes to the portrait the media and his opponents sought to create (as in the CBS “Thunder on the Right” documentary) that Barry Goldwater was a far-right wing extremist, a nut case.

It’s clear that some commentators learned that linking someone with whom you disagree to “Nazis” sometimes worked–at least in the mid-1960s. Note how many (Pelosi, lefty–and some righty–blogs, et. al) continue this vile practice today with the Tea Party activists. The only tactic more popular than linking an opponent to “Nazism” is–to accuse them of “racism”!

Lord’s list is not comprehensive; to even attempt such a project would require a book. However, his conclusions are spot-on, including this one:

It is because of these people and their institutions that stories about President Clinton, John Edwards, Van Jones and ACORN have had considerably different endings then they surely would have had if the country had to depend on your Old Media. Why? Because the Old Media is not about the “news,” it is about promoting liberalism, using access to ink and air time to convince Americans that “that’s the way it is,” to borrow the late Mr. Cronkite’s famous phrase. When in fact the news as delivered — or should I say undelivered — by the establishment media was and still is really about the personal political agenda of its liberal journalists. The Old Media has lost all pretension to being the umpire. It is the batter — and the pitcher, infield and outfield players as well.

We can’t even call the Mainstream Media “mainstream” anymore.

Bernie Goldberg says the “Mainstream Media Must Go!“. He’s referring to the MSM label–and not the sniffling, supposedly-elite journalists that prowl the increasingly empty NYC, LA and Washington corridors of the Has-Been Media (HBM).

Some Big Media figureheads are now choosing to say that they were ignorant about the news, rather than simply admitting that they know and don’t report it.

ABC: CHARLIE GIBSON SAYS HE DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE ACORN STORY

Charlie Gibson of ABC News had a perfectly reasonable explanation why he ignored the ACORN story: he didn’t know about it ACORN Watch: Charlie Gibson and the ostrich media. ABC’s Jake Tapper reported on the Census Bureau’s cutting ties with ACORN–and yet, Gibson still missed the story.

Question: Will Charlie notice the story now that the Senate voted 83-7 to cut off ACORN’s funding?

Readers may hazard their own guesses.

Here’s the extraordinary example of the anchor of a news organization’s flagship product basically saying, “My business is news but I didn’t know the news. I guess I was uninformed.” One is almost tempted to exclaim, “Poor Charlie!”–until it’s remembered that about a year ago, Gibson morphed into a bit of a school master when he felt Sarah Palin was uninformed about her “Bush Doctrine” lessons.

DAN RATHER, MARY MAPES CLAIM THEY WERE SUCKERED

At least CBS replaced Dan Rather over dishonest “reporting”. Rather and his CBS producer, Mary Mapes, put fake documents on the air a month before a national election in 2004 purporting to show that President Bush was a slacker who pulled strings to avoid serving in Vietnam.

From A “Lost” Fact in the “Rathergate” Mess — Part 1:

Until now, the controversy over the Rather/Mapes story has centered almost entirely on one issue: the legitimacy of the documents – a very important issue, indeed. But it turns out that there was another very important issue, one that goes to the very heart of what the story was about – and one that has gone virtually unnoticed. This is it: Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Who says? The outside panel CBS brought into to get to the bottom of the so-called “Rathergate” mess says.

Trust in the news media–surprise!–continues to fall: according to Pew Research, only 29 percent said the media generally “get the facts straight”. [Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low]

When you’re more interested in your perks, salary and standing among your like-minded peers than you are in getting news out, then your business model is doomed to failure. A look at Mainstream Media Cuts: Jobs, Bureaus, Stock Prices, Advertising, Ratings bears this out.

Of course, if you’re a Big Media Mouthpiece for Big Government, it’s natural, ala Dan Rather, to consider a Big Government bailout of Big Media.

An emphatic Dan Rather implored Obama, “to form a White House Commission to help save the press,” according to an Aspen Daily News report yesterday. The article went on to quote Rather as saying, “Such a commission on media reform ought to make recommendations on saving journalism jobs and creating new business models to keep news organizations alive.”

Again, a new business model might be to simply report the news–instead of the regular MSM cycle of scrubbing, filtering, rinsing and spinning it.

But then, that wouldn’t require a government bailout–only hiring some journalists instead of the toadies and sycophants that currently dwell in the the places that once reported the news.

by Mondo Frazier

images:
* Gibson: http://douggeivett.files.wordpress.com
* Rather: http://cache.gawker.com
* News graph: http://people-press.org/report/543/
* fingers in ears: http://image.guardian.co.uk