JAKE TAPPER, LUDDITE: Tapper Gripes: Unlike Nixon, Trump Has Fox News, Die-Hard Websites.
Curious that one of the most visible spokesmen for the first 24/7 cable television news network is longing for the days of mass media, of which Watergate was old media’s last gasp as a unified block. As Shannon Love of the classically liberal Chicago Boyz economics blog told me back in 2007 for my piece in the New Individualist magazine, “Atlas Mugged: How a Gang of Scrappy, Individual Bloggers Broke the Stranglehold of the Mainstream Media:”
By the early 1970s, mass media had reached its zenith (if you’ll pardon the pun). Most Americans were getting their news from one of three TV networks’ half-hour nightly broadcasts. With the exception of New York, most big cities had only one or two primary newspapers. And no matter what a modern newspaper’s lineage, by and large its articles, except for local issues, came from global wire services like the Associated Press or Reuters; it took its editorial lead from the New York Times; and it claimed to be impartial (while usually failing miserably).
Up until the Reagan years, Love says, “definitely fewer than one hundred people, and maybe as few as twenty people, actually decided what constituted national news in the United States.” These individuals were principally concentrated within a few square blocks of midtown Manhattan, the middle of which was home to the offices of the New York Times. The aptly nicknamed “Gray Lady” largely shaped the editorial agendas not just of newspapers but of television, as well. As veteran TV news correspondent Bernard Goldberg wrote in his 2003 book Arrogance, “If the New York Times went on strike tomorrow morning, they’d have to cancel the CBS, NBC, and ABC evening newscasts tomorrow night.”
Love calls this “the Parliament of Clocks”: creating the illusion of truth or accuracy by force of consensus. “Really, the only way that consumers can tell that they’re getting accurate information is to check another media source,” Love says. “And unfortunately, that creates an incentive for the media sources to all agree on the same story.”
And it’s very inconvenient for them for outliers to exist. (See also: career arcs of Dan Rather and Brian Williams.) But in a truly demassified media world, all worldviews, from the left, to conservatives, to libertarians would have their share of media resources to turn to, which, as I wrote in the above article, actually was the case in America prior to the rise of the original “big three” national radio and later TV networks in the first half of the 20th century. Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with Chyrons to understand why they pine for what they view as the good old days.