News Media: Stop Digging

The first rule of getting out of a hole you have dug yourself into is to stop digging. But at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday, they handed out shovels at the door.

Let’s review the state of American journalism. Newspapers are teetering on the edge of collapse, with a savvy investor sooner scooping up a handful of Chrysler common stock then pumping cash into the Boston Globe. The New York Times’ stock is so toxic it can only be stored inside the Yucca Mountain repository, and I can’t drive by the Los Angeles Times building without some laid-off lifestyle columnist offering to wash my windshield for a buck. Some newspapers have gone entirely on-line, making them not even newspapers at all.

How about the traditional networks? I’m not even sure that NBC has news anymore. The audience for the CBS Evening News is getting so wizened that a recent survey revealed that the majority of its elderly viewers consider Murder, She Wrote reruns ‘too edgy.” And their news department had the most efficient business model too – why pay to gather real news when you can just make it up? By the way, was that Dan Rather I saw ranting on one of those weird networks at the far end of the cable box, between the channel running 24-hour a day Hummel figurine sales and the one devoted to large and loving it women?

Now, if I remember correctly, about 53% of voters voted for the President. Well, there’s no disputing that American journalism serves that chunk of the audience. Their fawning subservience to those in presently in power is even starting to creep out President Obama. “Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me,” he told his audience of tingle-legged supplicants. The audience seemed to miss the point, which is that they have abandoned their cherished no-holds barred objectivity and that he now owns them body and soul. Maybe I misunderstood from the assembled journalists’ delight, but isn’t that what the hip kids today call a “dis?”

So, what about the other 47% who didn’t vote for this president? With the Internet and cable undercutting newspapers and network news as business models, one might think that trying to appeal to this massive potential audience might pay dividends. Apparently, one would be wrong.

In an example of outside the envelope thinking, America’s journalists have decided that the smart move to save their disintegrating industry is not to simply ignore this half of the populace but to actively insult it. Guest comic Wanda Sykes set the tone by expressing her heartfelt desire that Rush Limbaugh’s kidney’s fail. I’m no marketing genius, but I’m not sure that it’s smart to publicly wish for the death of the spokesman for a good portion of your potential consumers. Sometimes it’s just best to keep the thinking inside the envelope.

Alienating potential customers is not proving to be an awesome strategy. But instead of, say, not insulting them anymore, the journalism establishment is trying a new tactic. It’s going to keep insulting its more conservative customers but tell these customers that it is in fact not insulting them and that they are stupid for believing they are being insulted.

For example, I cancelled the Los Angeles Times years ago, and every time some boiler room flunky would call me to re-subscribe I would patiently explain that I didn’t particularly want to pay for regurgitated leftism when I could just turn on MSNBC for free. I must not have been the only one because I started getting a scripted response that the caller would read off of a sheet that was probably labeled “Right Wing Idiot Spiel.” I was told that I was wrong and that the Times provides and respects “a wide range of differing views.” That’s true – it provides and respects the whole range of views from old fashioned New Deal liberal all the way to neo-Trotskyite communist.

The Times recently had another marketing brainstorm. Not enough people were buying the paper so they raised the newsstand price. I like that – the Times not only opposes capitalism but engages in passive resistance to its most basic laws.

The traditional news media needs to put aside their shovels and stop digging. But they won’t. They don’t even realize what kind of hole they are in. I just hope they keep those shovels handy – they’ll need them for their next job.