Yesterday, in my post titled “How to Lose Friends and Alienate Customers,” I mentioned that the late Ginny Carroll, of the then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek, admitted on C-SPAN that during the 1992 Republican Convention, she wore a button that said, “Yeah, I’m in the Media — Screw You.” Carroll was a bureau chief for Newsweek in first Detroit and then Houston — no doubt her professionalism, or the lack thereof, filtered down to the employees there who reported to her.
On Twitter today, Howard Mortman of C-SPAN spotted my post and pointed me to this clip from C-SPAN’s archives of Carroll and other Democrat operatives with bylines fuming to segment host Brian Lamb about how they were treated by delegates at the 1992 Republican Convention. It’s a brilliant example of journalists dropping the mask and demonstrating both their undeserved hauteur and their visible loathing of their customers:
“My reaction to that button [`Rather Biased’] and others, in part, is a button I bought yesterday that says `Yeah, I’m In The Media, Screw You!’….I do understand why a lot of people are upset with us, why we rank somewhere between terrorists and bank robbers on the approval scale. We do criticize. That’s part of our role. Our role is not just to parrot what people say, it’s to make people think. I think that sometimes I want to say to the electorate `Grow up!’”
When Matt Drudge became the first person to very visibly take advantage of the newfound freedom of the Internet, the revulsion that the MSM demonstrated towards him in the late 1990s was visceral. This pattern would be followed by how the MSM responded to the launch of the Blogosphere a few years later, and then the Tea Party.
Click image to view video at C-Span.
And they wonder why many on the right cheer when there’s news of fresh disaster concerning old media. This clip and others like it, such as this example featuring the late Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace sneering at the US military, are reminders of how much the MSM despises their readers — and much of America in general. Just ask them.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member