In a recent interview with Tommy Christopher from Mediaite, NBC’s Chuck Todd was asked, “To what degree do you think the opinion media influence the questions that are asked here?” “Here” refers to the White House press room.
Todd replies that “there is no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it.” Apparently it’s “an obsession” of his because he doesn’t think “that’s the proper way for us to decide what’s news.” (emphasis added)
And there you have it, folks: the legacy media no longer control the narrative and knowledge of that fact is causing more itching and chafing amongst “professional journalists” than a truckload of baby powder could cure.
Journalism isn’t just about facts, even though getting the facts right is obviously important. It’s also about what people know and from what perspective it’s told. For literally decades, ABC, CBS and NBC – along with partners-in-crime the New York Times, Washington Post et al. – have had a stranglehold on what the people know and when they know it. Journalists who cover the national scene created an exclusive club, deciding what would be covered and how. They lunched together and gave each other prestigious awards, basking in the limelight of their own making and smiling down at the little people from their pedestals on high. They’re still doing it, in fact.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the media forum. A little thing called the Internet became available to the public and within just a few short years, the narrative began to shift. Regular people started asking critical questions and expressing their opinions on the news of the day on things called blogs, calling attention to stories that they thought were important for one reason or another. Other people started reading and commenting on these blog posts. News aggregator sites such as the Drudge Report, which Chuck Todd views with such derision, also started popping up, posting headlines (sometimes raided from the MSM’s spike files) and allowing the people to choose which ones they wanted to read. The advent of e-mail and social networking like Facebook and Twitter added to the public’s ability to disseminate the news.
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More importantly, the people started asking questions about journalists like Chuck Todd. What are their motives? What makes them tick? What makes them the arbiters of what news should and should not be talked about?
In other words, media became interactive and – wait for it – market driven. Cable news is growing and within that category, Fox News is on the rise while CNN, the first 24-hour cable news outlet, is on the decline. More people than ever are getting their news online, where the myriad of choices allows them to read and hear different viewpoints and sift through them to find the truth.
Other businesses have learned to either give the people what they want or suffer the financial consequences. Now that “big journalism” no longer has a monopoly on news, it’s going to have to sink or swim. As we’re seeing, it’s not necessarily going to be a pretty spectacle.
Unfortunately, journalists, who by and large lean to the left and see themselves as part of the intellectual class, don’t like the fact that “the people” are determining what news gets the most attention. And not only are liberals of the opinion that you and I don’t know our rear ends from our elbows but they don’t believe in free markets either, which would explain why they feel it’s their duty to tell us what’s important and what isn’t – and why they’re having such a snit fit over this new era of market-driven journalism.
But as Thomas Sowell explains, being an intellectual doesn’t mean you have all of the answers:
Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.
I’ve argued in the past that people would be much more forgiving of what they perceive as media bias if journalists would drop the faux objectivity and let us know whom they support politically and what they think about the state of national and world affairs. We all have opinions, and they shape our worldview no matter what we may say to the contrary. But would that be akin to admitting that they have feet of clay just like the rest of us poor slobs? I’m not sure. Perhaps Chuck Todd could enlighten us.
My advice to Chuck Todd and anyone else who is fretting over the state of media today? Roll with it. Oh – and power to the people, baby.