One of the reasons our media is so corrupt is due to the fact that no one within it has the courage to police it. Unfortunately, the media is just one big grab-ass series of frat and sorority houses in which everyone fights to be the coolest of the cool kids and there’s no one with the integrity required to risk “their position” by saying, “Hey this is wrong!”
Our so-called media analysts, like the Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, and Politico’s Dylan Byers are nothing more than figureheads installed by the very people they’re supposed to hold accountable. They’re not watchdogs, they’re lapdogs, created to fool the public into thinking someone’s actually policing The Biased and the Beautiful.
Case in point, yesterday’s New York Times analysis of the ratings trouble NBC News is having of late:
NBC News has long been a dominant presence on network television, regularly winning the ratings competition against its evening news and Sunday morning political show competitors, and reveling in the “Today” show’s 16-year winning streak in morning television, a record not broken until April.
Struggling with declining ratings across all three franchises, however, and with news this week that the network is preparing to replace Ann Curry on “Today,” NBC executives are facing a new narrative that is being embraced by the competition. For the first time in more than a decade, NBC News appears adrift.
NBC’s major news shows, including “NBC Nightly News” and “Meet the Press,” have lost ground to rivals in the last year, causing wider concerns about the health of the news division, which has been the No. 1 television news operation in America for the better part of two decades. For now it is still No. 1 by almost every measure, but it appears to be more vulnerable than it has been at any time in years.
The most visible manifestation of this is “Today.” The morning show is a profit center for the news division, raking in several hundred million dollars each year and effectively subsidizing other news shows.
The writers are Bill Carter and Brian Stetler and the piece is a long one, almost a thousand words. But two words you won’t find are “credibility” and “scandal.”
Not once do Carter or Stetler mention the appalling history of NBC News’s race-baiting, including the “Today Show’s” unforgivable racial tampering with the audio of a 911 call made by George Zimmerman.
No mention of this or this or the hundred other examples of NBC News’ bias that has been viralized in New Media.
And you know the Times would never consider this as something that might turn viewers away in disgust.
Something else you won’t see in the piece are the letters M,S,N,B, and C, all gathered together up against each other. Apparently, the Times wants to pretend that the MSNBC fever swamp just doesn’t belong in a story about NBC News, even though Steve Capus, the man who oversees NBC News and was interviewed for the Times piece, is also in charge of MSNBC.
By avoiding the inconvenient MSNBC, the Times can pretend the radial left-wing network isn’t part of NBC News which in turn means the Times can avoid any messy talk about how that lunatic asylum is tarnishing the NBC News’ brand.
Thanks to MSNBC, the NBC News brand has taken a horrific beating over the last few years. It’s not just that the network is marginalized about as far to the left as one would think possible, but you also have scandal after scandal and fraud after fraud tolerated there, one as recently as this week.
And NBC News itself isn’t much better. You not only have the Zimmerman tape fiasco, but it took a full year and the possibility of a Congressional contempt vote to get Brian Williams to utter the words “Fast and Furious” –which he did without offering any real context.
Any fool who trusts only NBC for information must’ve been shocked to learn Vin Diesel’s causing trouble on Capitol Hill.
Even though their refusal to consider the obvious as the reasons for NBC’s problems makes the Times’ analysis hollow and incomplete, the media just simply can’t begin opening doors marked “biased” and “corrupt” to explain the downfall of the frat house next door. For to do so, even though it’s true, would mean that that might explain their own problems. And the moment that happens, faces will start to melt.
And so the media just keeps writing about one another, analyzing one another, covering for one another, and fooling one another.
Hopefully , within my lifetime, the corrupt media will “denial” itself right out of business.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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