What Took You So Long?

I was going to tack this as an update onto the NBC post below, but it’s worth breaking off on its own both to quote, and to ask a question. MSNBC’s deceptive edit of Mitt Romney’s campaign stop at a Pennsylvania Wawa was the last straw for Greg Kandra, a New York-based Roman Catholic deacon who has long history of working with the media and in the media, including multiple Emmys and Peabody awards. In a blistering post, Kandra wrote:

Forget it. I’m done.  You deserve what they’re saying about you.  It’s earned.  You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you.   You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more.  You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.

Good job.

I just have one question:

What the hell is wrong with you guys?

Far be it from me to complain when the scales fall from someone’s eyes, but as Kathy Shaidle asks, what the heck took you so long? Kandra could have come to precisely the same conclusion about the media by November of 2008 (or 2004, or 2000…) — as many of us already did. But still, as Victor Laszlo would say, welcome back to the fight.

Related: “Congratulations, Brian Williams. Your viewers now know less about Fast & Furious than Jon Stewart’s viewers.”