On 9-15-09, Charles Gibson (ABC) was on Don Wade & Roma, a local Chicago radio show, and they asked him what he thought about the ACORN/prostitution tapes and he said he didn’t know anything about it, never heard of it.
Like a bunch of 2-year-olds with their fingers in their ears, “I can’t hear you!!!” This was AFTER the Census Bureau announced it was no longer working with Acorn on 2010 Census, and AFTER the Senate voted 83-7 to defund ACORN in the pending HUD/Trans approp bill, and another State (FL, I think) says its gonna file voter registration fraud charges. So it’s “real” gov’t news, not ‘just’ Fox and Breitbart. But he’s never even heard of it? Not that ABC News made a decision not to cover it due to lack of time or whatever, but it doesn’t exist.
The same guy who looked down his nose (literally) at Palin when she asked for clarification of a very ambiguous and poorly formed “gotcha” question.
Last night, O’Reilly had a graphic on the number of times each major TV news network had run any story mentioning ACORN since last year—may be on his website, but the numbers were (CNN is approx., the others are exactly what he showed):
Fox News 322
CNN 60
MSNBC 10
ABC 2
NBC 2
CBS 1
Incompetent, stupid or dishonest? Why not all 3?
Says it all, doesn’t it? Not to mention, how the hell does someone who gets their news from the 3 bigs make any sense of the actual news of the day? It must all seem just random. Van Jones, a WH CZAR, leaves the administration before we even know who he is, let alone that there’s a controversy? Census Bureau cuts off ACORN, Senate votes to defund them, and we don’t even know who or what ACORN is, let alone that they had a relationship with the Census and got Federal money, or that they were in any way controversial? WTF???
There are some viable economic models out there: the Wall Street Journal charges an arm for the print edition or a leg for online, but the content is worth it. Community weeklies do OK in lots of places, with advertising and news at a local scale that is worth paying for, but would never work as a daily. Internet-only might work, if the content justifies it and you could keep unpaid links out. Some are trying it (Seattle Post-Intelligencer comes to mind).
What these all have in common is the content has to be worth paying for. Something that I would guess Brokaw and Friedman cannot and will never comprehend as a valid test.
The larger issue that Wretchard raises, the sociology, if you will, of the connection between the news media and power, will have to work itself out. For now, it seesm to be more a celebrity culture, where Bono and Oprah and others who can deliver an audience and/or raise a lot of $$$s are more “inside” than the news people, who I’m sure tresent it deeply, but why should anyone care about them?
No more James Reston or Arthur Krock or the Alsops. boo-hoo. No more covering up JFK as a serial philanderer who was addicted to pain killers and whose Addison’s Disease was almost out of control.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, the main thing we can do is get out of the way so the dinosaurs can die off and make ecological space for tomorrow’s birds and mammals.
