The Decade the MSM Won
It was the advent of low-cost, high-speed Internet access that did it. The shift from dial-up to cable started taking off at just about the start of this past decade, and the unforeseen result was that for the first time major newspapers and TV networks were in a serious fight to defend their turf. Encroachment by Internet news providers and pundits was pushing the mainstream media (MSM) into a battle over who gets to shape public opinion.
The mainstream media had won their control over the news because they owned the means of reaching vast numbers of people. Suddenly, advances in Internet software and network technologies made it possible for just about anybody to publish to a worldwide audience. Grassroots journalism was born. With the rise of the Internet as a resource for news and information, skepticism over the accuracy and reliability of mainstream reporting grew, and by the middle of the decade bloggers and Internet news websites had cut significantly into the MSM’s influence. But from the perspective of January 2010 it’s clear. At the end of the decade the MSM had won out, successfully imposing its political will on the country.
Two huge stories signaled that the Internet had arrived as an alternative to the print and broadcast media. On January 17, 1998, a news aggregation website, the Drudge Report, published a blockbuster story. It was a story that Newsweek magazine had tried to kill:
Web Posted: 01/17/98 23:32:47 PST — NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN
BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT
**World Exclusive**
**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!
The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication.
This was huge. In an earlier day, when the press made a story disappear it was gone. But now suddenly a major news magazine spiked a story, and it didn’t go away. And that wasn’t the end of the bad news for the MSM.
In September 2004, an icon of broadcast news took a direct hit, compliments of the Internet. CBS News anchor Dan Rather had aired a 60 Minutes story alleging that the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, had been guilty of insubordination and AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. According to Rather, family influence had kept Bush out of trouble over it, and Rather claimed he had the documents to prove it. CBS put them on its website so everybody could get a close look at them. Bad move. Scrutiny began almost immediately. Within hours this comment appeared on the Free Republic conservative message forum, setting off a series of events that brought Dan Rather’s broadcast career to an early finish:
To: Howlin
Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.
The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90′s. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn’t used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80′s used monospaced fonts.
I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.
This should be pursued aggressively.
47 posted on Wednesday, September 08, 2004 11:59:43 PM by Buckhead
In those two stories, two MSM strategies for “shaping” public opinion had been effectively hamstrung. In the first instance, the story on Drudge, a major news magazine was caught trying to kill a story. In the second, a network news anchor had been caught fabricating a story. In each case, media partisanship had been starkly revealed. Cover up the dirt for a Democrat. Make up some dirt about a Republican.
But getting caught didn’t turn the media from what they still believed their mission to be: to promote a progressive agenda. It meant they had to be more careful. They could no longer bury a story and expect it to stay gone, and they had to be more careful with their facts. Old formulas weren’t working the way they used to, but the mainstream media still had the loudest voices around, and they were still as partisan as ever.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that [should be regarded] as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and “frozen.”
– Saul Alinsky
From the start of his 2000 campaign for the presidency, George W. Bush was a target. He was Republican when the press was overwhelmingly Democrat — a forgivable sin if he lost, but he didn’t. That made him the target. He refused to cave in when Al Gore played the race card, charging that racially motivated voter intimidation suppressed the African-American vote at Florida polls during the 2000 election. When Gore demanded selective recounts in heavily Democratic Florida counties, Bush fought back. In a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Bush won. Immediately, liberal pundits declared Gore the should-have-been winner and Bush the illegitimate president.
The media even conducted its own recount and found that, except with the most liberal interpretation of voter intent, Bush still won. He was still the illegitimate president. A year later after all the recount dust had settled, Dan Keating and Dan Balz of the Washington Post reported:
Had Bush not been party to short-circuiting those recounts, he might have escaped criticism that his victory hinged on legal maneuvering rather than on counting the votes.
Then came 9/11. For a rare, brief moment the country stood united behind President George W. Bush. He inspired all but the most hardened leftists when he stood with his arm across the shoulders of a tired firefighter in the rubble of what once was the World Trade Center and said:
I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.
The Bush presidency was transformed. His new mission was the defense of the United States and the American people. The war on terror was under way.
Ridding Afghanistan of the Taliban was the no-brainer. What to do after that presented the more difficult question, but Iraq was in almost everybody’s mind. In years leading up to 9/11 prominent Democrats had gone on record: Saddam Hussein posed a threat that had to be stopped. Regime change in Iraq was U.S. policy. As late as eight months prior to 9/11, a Washington Post editorial warned of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq:
[O]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous — or more urgent — than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade’s efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction.
A week after the World Trade Center towers collapsed in New York, the Bush administration began to consider taking steps against Saddam Hussein, as the New York Times noted in mid-October of 2001:
On Sept. 19 and 20, the Defense Policy Board, a prestigious bipartisan board of national security experts that advises the Pentagon, met for 19 hours to discuss the ramifications of the attacks of Sept. 11. The members of the group agreed on the need to turn to Iraq as soon as the initial phase of the war against Afghanistan and Mr. bin Laden and his organization is over, people familiar with the meetings said. Both Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz took part in the meetings for part of both days.
But while the group agreed on the goal of ousting Mr. Hussein, they presented a range of views, including a discussion of the many political and diplomatic obstacles to military action.
”If we don’t use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster,” Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a member of the group, said in an interview.
Members of the bipartisan Defense Policy Board included Harold Brown, President Jimmy Carter’s defense secretary; former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger; R. James Woolsey, director of central intelligence in the Clinton administration; Adm. David E. Jeremiah, the former deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; former Vice President Dan Quayle; and James R. Schlesinger, a former defense and energy secretary.
This letter to the editor of the Times was fairly typical of the climate:
Published: September 25, 2001
To the Editor:
Re ”U.S. to Publish Terror Evidence on bin Laden” (front page, Sept. 24):
War on terrorism must go well beyond Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. While I am prepared to be patient and to give our president as much latitude as he needs to proceed, I will consider this war a failure if one year from now Muammar el-Qaddafi still runs Libya and Saddam Hussein still runs Iraq.
Decisive military action against Libya and Iraq will defang world terrorism much more effectively than killing bandits in Afghanistan.
SERGE LURYI
Setauket, N.Y., Sept. 24, 2001
A country at war had rallied behind its president from Texas, and the mainstream media were temporarily unable to attack their prime target. There was no choice but to rally along and wait for an opportunity. It would come a year and a half later.
An organizer … does not have a fixed truth — truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.
-- Saul Alinsky
By March 2003, Bush had made his case. Congress voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. But then a remarkable turnaround occurred. It seems once regime change in Iraq was no longer hypothetical, it was no longer Saddam Hussein who had to be stopped. Opponents were seeking ways that George W. Bush could be stopped. They found an opening in sixteen words from the 2003 State of the Union address.
The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
A year and a half after traveling to the African nation of Niger on behalf of the CIA’s counter-proliferation experts, Joseph C. Wilson IV, former ambassador to Iraq, wrote an editorial column for the New York Times. He accused the Bush administration of ignoring his findings and twisting intelligence in order to justify the invasion of Iraq:
The British government published a “white paper” asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium from an African country.
Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.
The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. …
The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.
Media luminaries picked up the story. Tim Russert, in an appearance on Imus in the Morning, spoke in grave tones about the seriousness of such a thing — that a president might falsify intelligence to make a case for war. The media herd followed.
But the verbal report that Wilson had given to the CIA on his return from Africa bore little resemblance to the editorial he wrote for the Times. If anything, the ambassador’s report corroborated Bush’s charge. A July 11, 2003, statement by Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said:
He reported back to us that one of the former Nigerien officials he met stated that he was unaware of any contract being signed between Niger and rogue states for the sale of uranium during his tenure in office. The same former official also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.
Ultimately the media had to admit that Wilson had not “debunked” the sixteen words from the 2003 State of the Union. A Senate Intelligence Committee report and the British Butler report concluded that accusations of Iraqi efforts to get uranium from Africa were “well founded.” But once the Wilson column was published, Democrats and their allies in the media began an all-out campaign to expose Bush duplicity. Bush tricked us into invading Iraq for the wrong reasons. Bush lied. Soldiers died. The intelligence had been twisted.
The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people …
– Saul Alinsky
In January 2004, the U.S. Army informed the media that allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the subject of a criminal investigation that had been under way since late 2003. The military soon announced that 17 soldiers had been suspended and that charges had been filed against six. That investigation resulted in eleven criminal convictions of soldiers involved in the abuse.
In addition to the criminal investigation, the Army opened an Article 15-6 inquiry into the conduct of the 800th Military Police Brigade, the unit in charge of Abu Ghraib. The results of that inquiry were made public in May of 2004 in a report by Major General Antonio Taguba. Between January and March the media showed little interest in the reports.
In April 2004, CBS’s 60 Minutes II program made it the subject of a broadcast and a feeding frenzy was on. The New Yorker published an article by Seymour Hersh titled “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” which asked: “How far up does responsibility go?” Between late April and early June, the New York Times ran a front-page story about the abuse at Abu Ghraib on 34 out of 37 days.
Leading Democrats piled on. Senator Ted Kennedy had an answer for Hersh: “Shamefully we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.” By implication, the abuse was systemic and authorized at the highest levels of the administration.
During the summer of 2005, the media and Democrats were bent on proving systemic abuse. Speaking of American soldiers stationed at Guantanamo, Senator Dick Durbin compared them to Nazis. Stories of abuse reached worldwide audiences. Michael Isikoff published an item in Newsweek claiming that interrogators had desecrated the Koran by flushing it down a toilet. Somehow it never occurred to Isikoff that a book might not fit down a toilet. Newsweek formally retracted the story, but not before at least sixteen people were killed in rioting throughout the Middle East.
But the passions were inflamed against George W. Bush. He was al Qaeda’s best recruiter, they said.
By 2006 the media had turned their attentions to secret programs that had been implemented to fight the war on terror. In late 2005 the Washington Post reported on the existence of secret CIA detention facilities, also known as “black sites.” A month or so later, the New York Times reported the existence of the NSA surveillance program in which international telephone traffic was monitored. It became commonly referred to as the “warrantless wiretap” or the “domestic” surveillance program since one side of the phone call could be in the US. In 2006 the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post all published stories revealing the existence of the terrorist finance tracking program.
While all of this was getting play in the media as more threatening to American civil liberties than protective against terror, the insurgency in Iraq was on the rise. Democrats and their media allies behaved as if the insurgents were deaf and blind. An insurgency prevails by the perception that its violence can’t be stopped. The media focused their efforts on the 2006 midterm elections, unconcerned that they were no longer neutral observers. Here is a sampling of headlines — by no means complete — all from the Washington Post and all from the first weeks of October:
- “Facing Reality in Iraq“
- “Blind Into Baghdad; Like scenes out of ‘Desperate Housewives,’ the war room machinations of the White House”
- “Bob Woodward and ‘State of Denial’“
- “How to Lose a War; The Bush administration’s mismanagement of Iraq has been chronicled in shocking detail“
By late 2006 it was clear that the surge in insurgent violence in Iraq had to be countered by a surge in U.S. forces in Iraq. The troop surge was accompanied by a change in strategy from force protection to counterinsurgency. Leading Democrats deemed it a failure even before any troops were in place. In April 2007, Harry Reid said the troop surge was not working and the war was lost:
“I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and — you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows — (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,” said Reid.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not cut off funding for the troops even while declaring the war a blunder:
Democrats will never cut off funding for our troops when they are in harm’s way, but we will hold the president accountable. He has to answer for his war. He has dug a hole so deep he can’t even see the light on this. It’s a tragedy. It’s a stark blunder.
But the surge did not fail. The surge troops were finally in place by mid-2007, and a steady decline in the level of violence in Iraq began.
By the end of the 2008 presidential primary season, the war in Iraq was largely over. Presidential candidate Barack Obama, when put on the spot by Bill O’Reilly, was forced to admit that it “succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated.” But General David Petraeus, architect of the surge, anticipated it. And George W. Bush, who put General Petraeus in command, anticipated it.
But the media campaign had done the job of shaping public opinion. What began seven years earlier amid bipartisan agreement, that Saddam Hussein represented a threat to the United States that could no longer be ignored, turned into an extraordinarily successful campaign to poison the Republican brand and George W. Bush. The saddest part was how media coverage had turned a victory of epic proportions into a tragedy, a blunder, a war undertaken for the wrong reasons. But one fact remains. Against the odds, a true parliamentary democracy has been established in Iraq.
And so the media stopped bringing it up. The 2008 presidential campaign was heating up and new targets were on the horizon. Sarah Palin found herself in the cross-hairs. The disparity in treatment by the press between Palin and Barack Obama was almost laughable. Hoards of reporters dashed off to Alaska in search of anything with which to smear Palin and her family. Nothing illustrates the contempt of media elites towards Palin (and Republicans) as the joke CBS’s David Letterman made at the expense of fourteen-year-old Willow Palin:
“One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game,” Letterman said, “during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”
Contrast Palin coverage to the obsequiousness accorded Obama. In late April of 2009, Jeff Zeleny of the New Yorker asked President Obama during a press conference:
During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office? Enchanted you the most from serving in this office? Humbled you the most? And troubled you the most?
The absurdity of the media coverage would be something to laugh about until you look at where it has gotten us. In 2000, George W. Bush promoted the concept of the ownership society. His domestic programs were aimed at empowering the individual, and to do that he planned to lower taxes, reduce regulation, improve the education system, and reform government programs that encouraged dependence. The war on terror took the Bush presidency in a different direction, but it was the media campaign against it that did the country the most harm.
It wasn’t enough to oppose policies in good faith. Bush was attacked on his integrity. By cutting marginal tax rates Bush was accused of giving away tax revenue to his rich friends. The failure of U.S. intelligence to accurately determine the state of Iraq’s weapons programs was the media’s evidence that George W. Bush lied and exaggerated to make his case for war. The war itself was said to be personal, since Saddam Hussein had launched an assassination attempt at Bush the elder. Saddam Hussein, once considered such a threat that U.S. policy supported regime change in Iraq, had become the victim to Bush.
The campaign had been so successful that anything Bush had ever proposed or supported was tainted by association. The Republican brand was in ruins. When the financial crisis struck, naturally it was blamed on Bush. It was the lax regulation of Wall Street firms, not the fraud and lax lending standards promoted by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that caused it all.
The backlash has been furious. The supermajority that voters gave Democrats out of exhaustion from everything Bush has led the country to a precipice. Bank bailouts have been used as leverage for government control of executive compensation. The auto industry bailout has given the federal government and the United Auto Workers union ownership of auto companies. Barack Obama even demanded regime change at GM, forcing Rick Wagoner to step down as CEO. Worst of all, the government is about to embark upon a takeover of the health care industry. And all of it is opposed by a majority of voters.
Although the left-leaning media have driven the country further left than it has ever been, the chances of it remaining there are pretty slim. Those who would once have been called “the silent majority” are now “the tea party” and they are not so silent. Nowhere has their impact been more pronounced than in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states. The special election for the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy was expected to go to Democrat Martha Coakley in a cakewalk. She lost to Republican Scott Brown. But the battle is far from over.
At this moment libertarians and conservatives are resurgent, but there is an awfully long way to go to get the country re-focused on promoting individual liberty, responsibility, and empowerment, instead of greater government control and entitlements. And that’s because, at this moment, at the end of this first decade in the new millennium, the mainstream media are the victors in their ideological fight against conservatism.
It is clear the MSM wanted Obama to win during the 2008 election. Problem is, if Obama fails (like he’s doing now), the MSM’s viewing public will blame them too. Bank on it. With the Internet and FOX News around now, not to mention conservative talk radio, it’s no major secret that the MSM supported Obama and now they have to stand by their man. If he fails, an irate viewership will turn on the MSM and they’ll be losing viewers at an even faster pace than their losing now. I already think it’s happening, given the huge ratings for FOX News. By 2012, I’ll bet FOX News will overtake and far surpass the three MSM news networks and that will be the end of them. The MSM went from reporting the news to becoming active participants in a campaign for Obama. Now they’re going to pay the price for it, especially NBC and its bastard child, MSNBC.
Heh…Dan Rather never thought that anyone would actually check the document. It flashed on in a projected picture over his shoulder….and he moved right into the “story”…Bush was AWOL…this was going to change the direction of the election and push Kerry in.
In earlier days he’d been right. Now there was access and people willing to look into the type format…who’d have thought it? It was the start of the revolution.
Makes you wonder how much other stuff CBS and the NEW YORK TIMES have made up over the years.
An excellent recap of just how the left, academics and the MSM have indoctrinated the American public. So well has the left indoctrinated the public that I could tell and show my brother and his wife who think the world revolves around the Messiah, that the sun rises in the east. But if the WON said it rises in the west and the MSM reported that it does, they would be it them and not me.
But as is my refrain, we on the right have let it happen.
Bush should have been more forceful in his defense and renunciations of the left. Our senators and congressmen and women should have defended our actions since 9-11. Our repsentatives should have had the backbone and convictions to get to a microphone and denounce the lies of the left. Nope. On any topic that is so blatantly wrong for America, our pols are silent. They are silent because of a lack of those convictions but also because they seek the limelight like RINO extrodinairre McCain.
Take for instance Fannie and Freddy. Where were the powerful refutations of Maxine Watters, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd by our side? How come nobody on our side in Congress stood up and did a presentation of what really happened? Certainly if our side was guilty of this malfeasance, the left would have exploited it. No, not our side with pols like Sen. Hatch and his, “my good friend” referring to Leahy…
Everything Mr. Bowler wrote is correct, but we let it happen because we were and are morally weak.
Quite an indictment, the whole horror reviewed. Depressing, given the fact that millions of morons passively absorb the anti-human, anti-freedom tripe of the media, a media comprised of some of the most narrow, ignorant, and bitter people in America. These people are so degraded they believe with a fanatic’s zeal that huge, central government is “progressive”, that there is no problem it can’t solve, and only reactionaries would resist.
This in spite of the weight of historical evidence in the inherent inefficiencies and corruption of central government, which the bright folks of the News can’t bear to even consider, a sure sign of an open mind indeed.
In mentioning Saddam Hussien I was reminded of his execution and the reaction of the NY Times. An editorial was published which expressed plain fury, barely restrained, and remarkably, directed at who else but George Bush.
By their enemies you shall truly know them. After the terrorists and not by any great margin, the scum of the earth.
Lose some battles, but win the war. Remember, some wars last for quite some time. For instance, the 100 years war, or the 30 years war.
As long as the elitists employ selective vision to “Bias” and “Arrogance” by Bernard Goldberg, terms like slither and ooze will be
applied to them by the folk who show respect for those two books.
A friend of mine stated that if media coverage in this country was fair, the Democrats would never be in the majority. By the way, Abu Graib does not bother me, does your conscience bother you?
The Quiet Desperation of the MSM
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” wrote Tennessee Williams, and well he should know. There’s a lot of desperation out there, both quiet and noisy, but all the sufferers aren’t men.
One very desperate group in America is the mainstream media, particularly the print media which is rapidly being supplanted by the Internet for people to get news, information, entertainment.
Thus we see the “old grey lady,” the New York Times, gradually, inexorably being reduced to an old grey bag lady as its readership declines by the day.
Pretty soon the only people reading it will be the Sulzbergers and their coterie of leftist sycophants.
Barring a federal bailout of the Times and other national lib media, which has been suggested and is not beyond possibility, that newspaper should be gone in a generation or less.
Its disappearance will be all very fitting and proper since it has long abused its position as the only non-taboid in New York City since the Herald Tribune bit the dust in 1967.
With a newspaper monopoly and in contradistinction to its motto, the Times has for years been printing all the news that fit its “progressive” philosophy rather than all the news that’s fit to print.
Another specially sweet instance of journalistic poetic justice is the plight of New York’s Newsday.
Long the only show in town . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1456)
A bitter victory maybe since no one but a total fool would believe anything the MSM report now.
No Abu Graib doesn’t bother me nor does the Iraq war I am troubled by Jessica Lynch though.
And disgusted with the decapatation videos, the dragging of US troops bodies around, the burning and displaying of contractors body parts from an over pass, the display of dismembered and executed American soldiers corpses.
The formerly MSM, now known as the legacy media, is victorious like the Japanese were at Pearl Harbor. They have awoken the sleeping giant. We’re coming for them. They are over.
The media has declared itself the enemy of the American people and the US constitutional system of limited government.
If the media so much wants to be seen as the enemy, perhaps it is time for the people to begin to treat the media as the enemy?
Time to plot out the strategy, using any tactics that may be effective — including the tactics of the MSM itself. This is a battle over the future survival of free speech, free markets, and freedom of association.
The MSM won because President Bush would not fight back, and he occupied the space necessary for successfully fighting back. He refused to perform his leadership role in shaping public opinion, and by complete inaction blocked others from doing so.
Bush was a complete disaster as a party leader. Hopefully Romney has learned something from this.
11. Tom Holsinger:
I’d say Romney is our best hope, but unfortunately I worry that he’s every bit as poll and focus group driven as Obama is. He’s articulate but I fear he lacks the aggressiveness and willingness to look Obama in the face and lay out names like Rezko, Wright and Ayers.
I fear he’s going to need to develop a steel backbone, but may lack the drive to do so. I have zero faith in Palin.
11. Tom Holsinger: “The MSM won because President Bush would not fight back….”
Well, he did plant a fake shill in one of his news conferences. And he did stage phony town meetings (“I’m glad your my president!” … “What can I do to help YOU, Mr. President?), but I guess you meant that he didn’t fight back fairly.
great article.
The last hurra of the Columbia school of journalism is now over. The age of Breitbart has begun.
You are totally wrong. The big story is that non traditional media were able to keep such a weak man afloat for two terms.
I admire what Bush did with the surge. It was brave and it will be remmebered. But I agree to a large degree with #11: Bush painted a “Hit Me” on his back and stood there–taking a lot of good things with him.
Bush was no conservative and inspired no principled loyalty: he spent like no tomorrow, failed to veto any spending bills, winked at earmarks, and allowed Dennis (Where is my next meal?) Hastert to turn the House into something like to a racetrack betting office. The result? He never had a solid base of genuine support as Reagan and even Nixon did.
He never connected with the People, huddling instead in D.C. with pols and pundits.
He was a terrible administrator and lacked the touch that Reagan had: Reagan would have cared if Walter Reed had mold in it: Reagan would care if US soldiers were being blasted apart by IED’s that our military had failed to handle; Reagan would have landed in Katrina.
Nixon vetoed spending bills. Went on TV. He fought in the open for a lot. So did Reagan. Not Bush.
Bush never seemed to care about much. Reagan would have gone on TV or made a speech directed to People not reporters: Bush could barely articulate a thought. He had to rely on people feeling sorry for him in debates with Gore.
When Gore went to the courts–a dastardly move of historical importance yet to be appreciated– Bush huddled with his lawyers and acted like there was nothing to be said to the waiting public.
He COULD have denounced Gore as a sore loser, as doing something that Nixon had not done in 1960 despite good cause, and no US Presiedntial candidate had EVER done. But he let Gore set the tone and the perception that somethign “unfair” had happened in Florida.
The only “unfair” thing was Gore wanting a second, third and fourth selective recount and then running to court for th first time in US Presidential hsitory. Gore tried to steal an election. Bush sat quiet as if it didn’t matter what People thought. Well it did. Even now I have to listen to mrons that ahve neevr read BUSH v Gore; that don’t seem to be bothered by any factual basis for their claim that a presidential election was stolen.
Bush was preferred to Gore and Kerry only because both of them were infinitely worse.
The MSM had the biggest, most cooperative target ever. The real story is not that they nailed the unresisting, unprotesting Bush.
The real story is that the new media–bloggers–were able to prop Bush up for two terms until they too got tired of him, the corruption he winked at and his failure to speak for the fairness and principles millions had hoped he would foster.
Abu Graib bothers me, and I’m a conservative.
If it doesn’t bother you maybe you should look over the constitution and Geneva Convention one more time. Leave politics out of it for once.
It’s a Pyrric victory. If the GOP is smart enough (a big if), they should be able to tie MSM, Obama and DNC into one big knot and drown them in the 2010 and 2012 elections. Even without GOP, the MSM survival depends on Obama’s popularity. If Obama’s economic policy tanks, and he loses his charm – the MSM will have to answer before the public. Why? Because the only explanation the public can accept about its erroneous voting for Obama would be the MSM conspiracy to promote Obama. And this is the line that GOP should be pushing….
During his terms in office, I was terribly disappointed that president Bush did not stand tall & defend himself. In addition, as the article’s author points out, neither did almost any of the Republican caucus. At the time, FOX News had not risen to its current prominence. So the ‘legacy media’ had their way. And their way was pure propaganda, with leftist elitist snobbery to boot. The uneducated (Bush supporters), needed to be taught how despicable their positions were. Leftists needed to band together & remove the despicable Republicans who were responsible for all the nations ills.
How so many failed to realize the legacy media had given virtually all Democrats a pass on responsibility for almost anything, is beyond me.
From Iraq intel failures (that even many other nations’ intel agencies supported), to why toxic credit derivatives caused the entire financial meltdown by dragging down every other financial sector, to false stories of abuses by military personnel, the legacy media had hoodwinked a public that seemed all too willing to believe anything they were told.
This article does an outstanding job of outlining the media failures & their complicity when it comes to duping the public, so a leftist agenda could be pushed on Americans. That McCain’s eligibility was vetted by members of Congress, but none was done of Obama is but one of the obvious partisan actions the media promoted. Obama probably is an American. Now he is in office, it probably does not matter. BUT, to ignore some very real questions based on some very obvious flaws & time line disparities, is shameful. Attacking any who ask questions shows the public we no longer have real investigative journalists. If this attitude had prevailed during Watergate, Nixon’s cover-up attempts would not have been exposed. Lets face it, at that time, many of the facts or questions were inconceivable. Obama’s eligibility is currently, according to the legacy media, inconceivable. Yet this time around, that same media is not investigating the possibility Obama may actually not be eligible to be President. Why then was it Pulitzer level investigative journalism, but now, its the talk of hyper partisans, nut jobs, & racist conspiracy theorists? Or is it the media does not want to question a black man’s eligibility? My question is, why would his skin color be any issue at all?
Now that the legacy media has been exposed as the hyper partisan, discriminatory, biased, extreme left wing opinionated operation it is, does anyone really think that during Obama’s tenure, the left will not go all out to tear down alternative media, by imposing all levels of controls? His FCC Czar wants “localism councils” who would limit what ‘they determine to be’ issue talk on radio, to so many hours a day, & only during those hours ‘they decide’ are appropriate. That means, conservative talk may be relegated to midnight & six am. Then, station owners would be required to present ‘alternative’ views (meaning liberal), at assigned times. Probably prime listening hours.
They mean to do this despite the very real fact that Air America, the ultra liberal talk radio network, has just filed for bankruptcy. Why? Because listeners were not tuning in & advertisers were not willing to pay for dead air. In addition, National Public Radio (NPR) has also been an abysmal failure & remains on air only because taxpayers subsidize it. NPR is as left as it gets, with virtually NO conservative views expressed. In fact, conservative views are regularly disparaged by NPR commentators.
By politically attacking conservative media outlets & hosts, the left hopes to establish legal or legislative, ‘and’ regulatory controls on media outlets. In doing so, they hope to make up for all their lost viewers & listeners, by severely limiting conservative talk.
So we all had better be aware & ready to fight when the left tries to limit, shut up, & even shut down, any & all conservative views from media outlets. Its coming. It will be subtle, but it will come. And, they will try to do this behind the scenes. They will try to do this without creating any noise so the public would be unaware whats happening. By the time many realize whats happened, conservative talk would have already been lost & the fight to get it or even any back, would be more uphill than trying to save it from being shut off now!
Bush was a grownup and didn’t complain about the relentless attacks on him, his policies and his character.
History will judge him, not the utterly stupid MSM who desperately tried to destroy him.
The dinosaur MSM may not be extinct, but they are being put out to pasture, where they most certainly belong.
Thank God for the internet, Drudge, Breitbart and all who try to get the TRUTH out to the people. They are the real heroes today.
As a people we can boycott the socks off of the MSM, ignore their Marxists rants, and relegate them to the dust bin of history.
A very ambitious post pulled off quite well. I only quibble with one aspect – did the MSM really ‘win’?
I don’t really agree. I mean while they remain annoyingly dominate, at least we have some fair and balance options happening. When I pop into my local bookstore, or even the big box Barnes and Noble, I don’t in any way feel like some secret agent on a espionage mission, a feeling that was normal twenty or so years ago.
I mean Barnes and Noble (stressed to compete as they are by everyone from Amazon to the Conservative Book of the Month Club) is very interested in accomodating me for my money as a conservative.
Likewise when I look at the magazine rack I don’t feel that much of an outsider. Don’t get me wrong – 75% is overwelmingly liberal oriented – but. Back around 1990 – even after Reagans run – that rack wasn’t nearly as friendly. More like two instead of twenty.
In fact, in the age of blogs and Fox News, the argument about the MSM is getting worse than stale. It’s turning into more of a shrill whine. Or at least a crutch in stead of tackling difficult subjects.
As a C-span junkie, who WATCHES authors talk about their books way more than I actually read books (most of my tastes are for modern classics – hense – I spend at a great 2nd hand store like Thrifty Dan’s here in Phoenix much more than Amazon or B&N), I doubt that conservatives have had it this good when it comes to media since at least the Guilded Age. A time when bat #$%^ crazy progressives were truly relegated to stinky slums instead of the White House or a swanky faculty lounge.
and one last thing – can’t resist – 7. Berlet98: I think you got the Tennessee Williams attribute way off. The Gay hero of same sex marriage folk left quite an impact on post war america, but it was Henry David Thoreau who contributed the quintesential existentialist observation about quiet desperation. Your off by about a hundred years.
The big media story to me is why the MSM turned on Hillary Clinton and decided Barack Obama was the one?
If you recall, flattering photos and stories were all over the MSM about Clinton. My liberal friends had “Hillary!” bumper stickers. Nothing bad was printed about her or spoken about her.
Then, overnight, Hillary became the target. The Serbian “landing under fire” story was debunked. Unflattering pictures were printed and stories about her contained the same negative words that the MSM used for Republicans. I remember Hillary at a press conference, looking like she’d been slapped, looking bewildered. How could this be happening to her?
My liberal friends obediently scraped off their “Hillary!” bumperstickers and pasted “Obama” stickers on. And I remember one of my friends, who stuck thick and thin with the Clintons through every bit of the impeachment, snarling that Hillary should just “shut up.”
So does anyone know why? Who decided to abandon Hillary and tear her apart, and then lacquer Obama and prop him up?
The genie is out of the bottle and is never going back in. None of us would have been able to post our comments here before the ascendency of new media. We’re here. Get used to it. Nowadays the Tet offensive would have been seen for the huge victory that it was instead of the Cronkite Commie view.
First you have to realize that this whole Obama usurper thing is far bigger than most can believe. It is world wide and fulled by the world’s desire to see America’s power be reduced to the point that it is no longer the most powerful Nation on Earth. Since the USSR broke apart there is no country that can challenge the good old USA. This puts fear into the hearts of Communists everywhere. So the people behind the rumored New World Order decided to find and fund a person they could be assured would follow their secrete orders and destroy America from within. In 2006 they found him! He was a unknown Chicago politician that had a exploitable fault, he was not only not a Natural Born American Citizen he was not even a citizen of our great country. This was perfect, for if this straw candidate ever went off track the plug could be pulled in a heart beat by releasing the truth about his citizenship. The New World Order now had the perfect sleeper candidate and he was raised as a Communist to boot, perfect. Hence for 4 years the money poured in and the MSM beat the Communist funded drum for the teleprompter reading wonder boy. He was also half Black, how wonderful no one could speak badly or ask hard questions to a Black man. No one did! But wait the MSM does not pull all the strings today there is still FREEDOM on the web. God bless the internet! WE have not lost the war yet!
21-Bonnie: Several reasons the MSM abandoned Hillary for Obama.
1. Liberal white guilt. Blacks are higher than women on the liberal victim ladder.
2. The MSM knew that Obama had a better chance of winning the general election. Hillary had high negatives, Obama didn’t. Obama was considered charismatic, Hillary a nag.
3. Hillary would have probably pursued a more aggressive foreign policy and a less socialistic domestic policy, more like her husband. They wanted a true progressive Marxist that hates Amerikkka as much as they do, and that was Obama.
Mr. Tom Bowler,
The finest piece of writing I’ve seen in a decade. Bravo. regards, rachel
I know one or two things about that little “Rathergate” business. For one thing, that was only a me-too story by CBS about Bush’s unarguably dubious military service: the Boston Globe for one flagged issues about it in 2000, and the Associated Press did the more serious investigating throughout 2004, including FOIA’s and lawsuits to force the release of records that Bush had promised near the beginning of the year to release. The 60 Minutes story was a standard length 12 1/2 minute segment that actually mostly featured an interview with Ben Barnes, who said (under oath in a court of law) that he helped Bush Jr. escape Vietnam duty by getting him into a “Champagne” Guard unit meant for the like of the sons of influential and pro sports players. The Killian Documents came later in the segment and actually also included comments by Bush’s mouthpiece Dan Bartlett.
While Buckhead’s Freeper posting did launch “Rathergate,” it was laughably tech-illiterate posting nevertheless. Proportional printing was actually pretty common throughout the 60′s and early 70′s, and had fallen out of favor by the late 70′s, for whatever reason, and didn’t start getting popular until the laser printers became popular. And by 1972, the date of the first memo, the word processor market was huge (IBM was already making more money selling word processors than typewriters by 1970), and by the mid 1970′s there were far more brand name vendors of word processing systems and printers than we have now of brand name computers.
The numbnuts who poo-poo’ed early word processors as suspects for creating the Killian memos because they were too expensive were also just as clueless: Xerox copier machines were even more expensive but everyone had them because they were leased, as was most heavy duty office equipment then, from IBM typewriter to word processors, and since these things were meant for multi-year heavy use, leasing was practical and made sense. And Charles Johnson’s little animation of a Word recreation of the shortest and simplest Killian memo overlaid on the original struck many as being the smoking gun for forgery, but a closer look at that animation shows way too much shifting despite an obvious “best fit” — to slightly more clueful eye, it looks much more like an overlay of a modern Times/New Roman font over an older Roman-style font, which would approximately match up but not be perfect. And if it was so easy for Johnson to recreate one memo, why not do the three others that CBS used? If you’re going to make such a serious claim of forgery, it would be logical to see how well all of the recreations match up, so why didn’t Johnson do it? Maybe because the other three documents, being longer and more complicated, don’t recreate well at all with Word (actually even Photoshop doesn’t work well at it either.) This is what you would expect if the memos were created with an early Roman style font on a daisywheel printer or such.
And what about the superscripts? The position of true superscript or subscript is based on a half line feed, and that’s been standard for several decades at least. And many typewriters and early word processors had a print element with a small “th” that would produce a true superscript if used with a half line feed. It was a manual operation generally in those days. I personally never seen or found any reference to anything other than the “th” being available as a superscript in old office equipment, including the “st” and “rd” which are normally also superscripted in modern word processors. The Killian memos had a mix of “th” and “st” ordinal suffixes, but none of the st’s were superscripted and only some of the th’s were. That makes no sense if a modern word processor was used. Some have claimed that this was because the supposed forger had trouble making Word not superscript, including having an odd space separating the ordinals in order to not have Word not automatically superscript, but this is an idiotic explanation — there were only 6 memos in total, so once you figure it out for one, it would be trivial to print them out all that way. That’s kind of the point of using a word processor. Also there were ordinals with no space in front that weren’t superscripted either. More importantly *none* of the “st” ordinals were superscripted, just some of the th’s. Again this makes no sense if a modern word processor had been used, but total sense if a old one had been.
All the other stuff about the format being wrong, the terminology, Killian scheduling a health exam, and so on were just added-on, utterly confused BS. As craptastic was the right wing blog sites were, the mainstream media didn’t do much better — absolutely nothing was researched, from military document formats to then common office equipment, to any discrepancies between the the DoD archive of all of (supposedly) Bush’s service records, to even digging up contemporaneous military memos for basic comparison (the Washington Post compared some memos to records of a different type, which was sort of comparing sheep to goats.) One of the many things nobody got clear was that “Memorandum for…” military documents, however serious sounding, are not considered official records and hence are rarely if ever archived if they were not of a classified nature.
That’s why there isn’t a single memorandum in that DoD database of Bush’s records. Some diligent web surfing does dig up some declassified military memorandums, like this one from 1961 in this PDF file, and as with many if not most of these types of memorandums that you can find from the 60′s and early 70′s, it is obviously proportionally printed. There is second shorter document from 1993 included in that PDF that is related to the FOIA request for the main document: even though it’s a much more recent document, it isn’t proportionally printed (although it is right justified via microspacing the widths between words.)
I could go on and on, but I think you guys suspect, (and Rand Simberg knows), where this is all heading. But it’s now into the early hours of Sunday and I’m taking Sundays off from all this political crap.
26 BC: “While Buckhead’s Freeper posting did launch “Rathergate,” it was laughably tech-illiterate posting nevertheless. ”
I have to laugh at the acknowledgement of an avg Joe figuring out the ridiculous Rathergate “fake but accurate” fraud, casual dismissal and then paragraphs of defense of same. I think in reailty, you just cant stand that a “mouthbreather”, “nuckledragger”, “neanderthal” was able to bring down one of your elite propagandists.
OOH OOH! Now do gloBULL warming. Why doesn’t manbearpig call it goBULL warming any more? Why isn’t ManBearPig a vegetarian when your own bible (The IPCC fraud) says eating meat will do far more to combat gloBULL warming than automobiles? Why is it now called “climate change” instead?
Historic note:
The battle was won.
The war was lost.
It happens in Australia too.
From Andrew Bolts Blog-Jan 30th, 2010, his comments on a newly published book by Nike Savva former National Capitol political correspondent;-
“Niki Savva, this paper’s former chief political correspondent and a “conservative leftie”, speaks frankly about her old Canberra colleagues in her new book:
“When it comes to scheming and lying, plain old hypocrisy and dishonesty, journalists – apart from a few honourable exceptions – win hands down. If you can call it winning.”…
Having seen the relationship between politicians and journalists from both sides, Savva describes it as “symbiotic, parasitic, narcissistic and toxic”.
“Just as journalists use politicians to get what they want, politicians have to work out which journalists to use, how, and when – and whom they can afford to offend in the process,” she says. “They have to walk a minefield and be prepared to cop the explosions. Or the revenge.”…
She agrees with Ronald Reagan’s former speechwriter Peggy Noonan that “modern political journalism is a protection racket” where politicians are either sources or targets…
She is brutally honest about the way she herself operated as a political journalist.
“I learned to slice and dice anyone who deliberately fed out misleading information, or who spoke to others and not me,” she says.
If a backbencher refused to leak information to her about party meetings, she never mentioned that MP’s name in a story again – “unless they had done something wrong, of course”.
Another confession: “As a journalist I lied often, usually about my sources, but about other things, too. Journalists can and do get away with lying; politicians and staff can’t. Nor should they.”
Problem is, if Obama fails (like he’s doing now), the MSM’s viewing public will blame them too. Bank on it.
You underestimate them. When Obalma will begin to sink they will abandon him, they begin to attack him or even support a conservative as his successor. But don’t believe they will have cha,ged. Their goal will be to preseve themselves for the next fight. As soon as the dust settles they will turn progressive again. It has happened in other countries.
About BC who tell us that the fake documents produced by Dan Rather and CBS were in fact authentic. What I find remarkable is that no one in the Democratic side stepped up in 2004 to debunk the debunking and give the victory to John Kerry. After all they had the whole of CBS to air their findings ie were in a far better position than the republican bloggers who exposed the cheating. But no. They kept quiet, let election pass, Bush (or is that BushHitlerChimp?) and after those who had investigated the Rathergate had moved on to other tasks, that is when nobody is looking, they “find” evidence that the documents were indeed authentic. Can anyone say “1984″?
BTW, Xeroxes were not ubiquitous. That is you had one per floor or even one per building. For typewriters what we are discussing here is someone on his regular typewriter producing variable spaced documents. Such equipment was expensive and only assigned to a few trained personnel for special documents. Other people used normal typewriters who produced monospace fonts.
If it doesn’t bother you maybe you should look over the constitution and Geneva Convention one more time.
I have. The GC says that people who don’t fight by the rules should be shot. The GC were designed to make war less inhuman and given that peiople want to win and survive, the only way the GC would work is by making the people who cheat not get any benefit of it. Example: You fire from a hospital and laugh because the enemy can’t fire back. Right? Wrong!!! You just have given him the right to fire back and to execute you as war criminal. I am not even sure he is mandated to make your death being quick and relatively painless. End result: you don’t cheat and the hospital stays unharmed. But malicious MSM people friendly to “progreesive” guerrillas have planted into the minds of people too lazy to fulfill their duties as citizens the idea that the GC require that the good guys stand and smile while the bad ones are cheating and killing them. Millions have died due to this, either directly or indirectely after victories handed to such people as Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot.
George W. Bush did defend his actions. He had too much class to stoop to the level of the MSM or the Democratic leadership. I thought, like he must have, that the american people would see through the lies and name calling and discredit those involved. Interviews and press conferences were occasions to display accusations. (When will you stop beating your wife.) If there is blame, it rest with the the dishonest MSM and the Republicans who ran like scared rabbits.
And let’s not forget the press is still pushing what I consider not only the greatest scientific fraud in the past century, but a journalistic one as well: “man-made” global warming. Does it get any more crooked than this?
To JFM: Back in those days, IBM Selectrics typewriters were going for over a grand — everything was leased and expected to last a decade (ever take a good look at how seriously heavy duty any old office typewriter is?) And people were even more tech illiterate than they are now, and the “average joe” saw little difference between, say, an old Selectric typewriter, an IBM Mag Card system, or a Diablo daisy wheel printer, which meant that most people’s memories of what was around then were/are utterly untrustworthy. But by the mid-70′s the word processing industry was not a mature one, but was already going through consolidation with bigger, established computer and office equipment firms like Burroughs and 3M buying up smaller WP system manufacturers. Rathergate happened because people relied on fuzzy, confused memories rather than do any research.
And because the office equipment in question was from so long ago, and scrapped as obsolete, along with their documentation, well before there was a World Wide Web, there was/is very little info on Google and such, aside from little random bits like this or this. I actually had to go to a real library, Boston’s main library branch, to books that referenced early office equipment like word processors. Little did I know that my bothering to physically go to a library to look up stuff represented more research than what the entire mediasphere — right, left, or corporate — would end up doing.
The only thing really preventing the current “Climategate” nonsense from becoming the next Rathergate is that you have lot more defenders — climate researchers as well as the overall scientific community — who actually do research and hence have facts (as opposed to factoids) on their side. Given how really, really bad — again — the corporate media has been in its now typically numbnutted “coverage” of the supposed controversy, we’re lucky the polling numbers of people’s confusion are not worse.
Nice try BC. While the Selectric was revolution due to its printing mechanism it was still at the core a basic, classic type writer: every time you typed a key it went directly on paper. That made variable spacing (who requires to wait until a whole line has been typed to in order to compute space and inter-character width before anything is printed on paper) impossible to implement on a 1000$ Selectric or on any type writer who prints as you type and has no internal memory. Oh and 1000$ were _real_ money in those times.
Also you still have skipped the basic issue: If the debunking was false why did the democrats let Bush win instead of debunking the debunkers? If their “proofs” were solid why your anti-debunkers have ensured nobody cares to cross-examine their assertions by waiting until the theme becomes irrelevant? (In case you don’t know Bush is no longer in the WH)
To JFM: ?? I never said the Selectric was used, and you’re badly confused on that “variable spacing” stuff — proportional spacing was/is based on assigning units for character width and spacing, and many pre-Selectic IBM models could do this as well as competing models.
As far as the “debunking” bit goes, my impression is that most people — liberal and conservative alike — found researching early 70′s office tech and military documents as hard to understand as how we were able to go dune buggying on the moon back then.
many eons ago buckley had a short lived conservative paper in NYC, the TRIB. maybe we need it reincarnated????
It all started in 1960 when the MSM realised that a 5 o’clock shadow on prime time television can cost you the presidency.
Since then they have been creating characters at will, selling them to the public.
Their most recent lucrative inventions, Obama and Palin, reflect sorely on the state of the nation – very sorely indeed.
Can you please stop calling the old corrupt media as MSM. They should be called left wing partisan media. Is nothing wrong in being partisan or ideologue, just don’t let them pretend to be mainstream or impartial. Don’t stop Reminding the public what they
are LWPM
BC
You gave the price of a Selectric, who at that time was real money. Selectric didn’t do proportional fonts. Anything doing it was _much_ more expensive. Like, say, the price of car when we adjust to today’s purchasing parity. How many companies put the price of a car over the desk of every paper pusher they have?