Michael Gerson: Boo Hoo, Big Media is Shrinking

MSM BOO HOO of the DAY: Journalism’s slow, sad death

M. Gerson of the Washington Post sheds a tear for the impending death of dinosaur media. He points to the Internet as the cause of death, but that’s just a symptom.

The death of trust in the Mouthpiece Media had to occur first–and Big Media has worked hard and long to kill it. ONE MORE POINT. It’s taken years, but the MSM has validated a prime tenet of the capitalistic system so many of their members disparage: people won’t pay for a defective product. When newspapers don’t contain the news their customers are looking for, they’ll go elsewhere.

That elsewhere for the moment is the Internet and Cable TV, specifically, Fox News–though Gerson doesn’t mention the news that the MSM dare not name.

Gerson’s employer exhibited its “commitment” to “journalism” by substituting cheer-leading for reporting during the 2008 campaign. One reason Gerson might be so glum is the awful reality that the press owns Barack Obama, just as surely as Obama now owns the recession. There’s no separating the two.

Big Media doesn’t understand the Internet very well and that has contributed to its death spiral. Instead of accepting the millions of hits sent their way on their stories (and the ads that accompany them), the AP is suing the hand that could feed them. Not sure what the word for it is in the hallowed halls of “journalism”, but from a New Media viewpoint, I’d call it “dumbass-ian”.

Gerson’s main complaint is that not enough readers agree with the Mainstream Media’s viewpoint:

Cable and the Internet now allow Americans, if they choose, to get their information entirely from sources that agree with them — sources that reinforce and exaggerate their political predispositions.

Guess there’s just not enough big city, elite, leftist, Big Government-loving Americans out there to support the NY Times editorial board in the style to which they’ve become accustomed.

Gerson whines about blogs linking to news sites, ["And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft."] but he says nothing of the use of the blogosphere by Big Media as a sort of unpaid and unattributed research unit. At least the blogs are linking and attributing. When the Times of London lifted quotes last year from DBKP’s interview with David Perel of the National Enquirer, they neither responded to our emails or corrected their thievery.

From the tales of fellow bloggers, it’s not a rare happening.

NOT ALL newspapers are dying; big city dailies are certainly on the endangered list, especially LIBERAL big city “newspapers” who filter the news through an snobbishly-elite progressive PoV. This writer still buys both the morning and evening editions of the local paper. But those papers have a conservative viewpoint–like the majority of its readers.

Other readers are not so lucky. Most big city readers are trapped with a newspaper that seems more intent on preaching Progressiveness, than reporting the news. Now that their readers have other choices, those like Gerson cry when they can no longer shove their PCBS down the throats of a captive audience. Better they had done their crying when their papers blacked out news readers deserved to know.

Readers turned to the Internet because where else were they to find news of the John Edwards scandal for 10 months? Not in Gershon’s WashPo. Currently, ClimateGate is big and it’s being covered–on Russian TV and Fox News and in the papers of the UK.

Gerson puts down the “birthers”. Did WashPo deign to do any digging on this issue? No, it didn’t. It recycled what other MSM organizations said about it. Talk about second-hand news. That makes the Washington Post less informed–and more expensive–than many of the blogs Gerson whines about.

Who wants to pay for that?

Meanwhile, Americans still are getting their news blacked out by their “journalistic” betters. Gerson weeps that those potential readers will no longer pay for the privilege of being kept in the dark.

We’ll say the same thing we said when not one reporter asked a presidential candidate about his mistress and the massive coverup that ensued: “Do your damn job.” Because newspapers like Gerson’s didn’t do that job, readers turned to other sources which did.

They won’t do their jobs and they cry like babies when they no longer can make a profit from the practice.

Good riddance–both to the elite smugness of the MSM and to its apologists like Michael Gerson.

Cross-posted over at I Own the World (with a better headline, I might add): Capitalism Works While Dinosaur Media Whines.
…and the comments are revealing about what everyday people think about the demise of the “brave new warriors of ‘journalism’”.

UPDATE @ 0920 EST November 29 2009:
John Nolte, at Big Government’ has a similar view: Objective Journalism: Michael Gerson Defends a Profession that No Longer Exists

by Mondo Frazier
image: property.bendylife.com