by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
The recent Dan Rather and Newsweek controversies hardly seem connected. But on closer examination, both incidents symbolize what has gone wrong with traditional news organizations.<\/p>\n
The old assumption was that opinion media \u2014 such as the National Review, The Nation and The New Republic \u2014 offer a slant on current events, but that major news outlets, outside of their designated opinion sections, do not.<\/p>\n
This commitment to disinterested reporting \u2014 and along with it the public’s trust in mainstream media \u2014 has been shattered in recent years.<\/p>\n
It’s easy to see why people no longer feel they can rely on a CBS News or a<\/i>Newsweek for information without bias. At CBS, Dan Rather persistently wished us to believe that a clearly forged memo was authentic. Michael Isikoff’s reliance on a single anonymous and unreliable source about supposed desecration of the Quran made an already jaded public believe that\u00a0<\/i>Newsweek was too eager to deliver a one-sided story.<\/p>\n
Three now-common themes appeared in each controversy:<\/p>\n
First, the misinformation erred predictably against the current American government. In CBS’s case, anchorman Rather impugned the president’s past military service. The Newsweek article questioned the ethics and sense of the American military.<\/p>\n
Second, these were not minor slips. The counterfeit documents that Dan Rather circulated undercut a sitting commander-in-chief in the midst of a national election. The fraud had the potential to alter the very governance of the United States. Newsweek’s wrong information incited the lunatic elements of the Middle East. Rioting and death followed, complicating the American military effort.<\/p>\n
Third, neither organization was markedly contrite when exposed. The culpable Dan Rather refashioned himself as the maligned target of the blogosphere. Newsweek spokesmen whined that a vindictive administration was hounding the management of their organization.<\/p>\n
In response, the public assumed haughty news organizations were caught exhibiting the usual partiality \u2014 and then on spec retreated to victim status when challenged.<\/p>\n
These recent controversies about our flagship news agencies were old news to the public.\u00a0<\/i>The New York Times still has not recovered from the Jayson Blair scandal, in which a young reporter wrote fictitious stories. Blair’s compliant editors worried more about political correctness than the qualifications and experience of their own reporters.<\/p>\n
The same syndrome was true earlier at The\u00a0<\/i>Washington Post and The\u00a0<\/i>Boston Globe, which were red-faced over the fabrications of reporter Janet Cooke and columnist Patricia Smith, respectively.<\/p>\n
In other example of media bias, CNN executive Eason Jordan confessed that his network had censored coverage of a mass-murdering Saddam Hussein \u2014 and later tossed offhanded false allegations that the American military deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq.<\/p>\n
With each expose, the harm has become cumulative \u2014 driving the public away from a now-stained mainstream media.<\/p>\n
News purists mock the yelling of conservative talk radio, hypersensitive renegade bloggers on the Internet and the sharp elbows of cable news. They shouldn’t. All serve the public as an antidote to the \u201cdisinterested\u201d High News that it no longer entirely believes.<\/p>\n
Bigheaded lectures for the umpteenth time about the \u201ccentury-old standards\u201d at<\/i>The New York Times, the \u201clegacy\u201d of Edward R. Murrow or the \u201cprestige\u201d of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism do not cut it anymore in a world of Jayson Blair, Eason Jordan and Dan Rather.<\/p>\n
Liberal copycats of talk radio fail, not because they are always boring but because there is little market or even need for such a counter-establishment media. The progressive audience already finds its views embedded in a\u00a0<\/i>New York Times or CBS \u201cnews\u201d story. So why turn to a redundant and less adept Al Franken, Phil Donahue or Arianna Huffington?<\/p>\n
Yet the irony is that while our major media are considered liberal, they are hardly populist. When Dan Rather and Newsweek are exposed, they seek refuge in stuffy institutional reputations and huffy establishment protocols. Meanwhile, a million bloggers with pitchforks \u2014 derided by a former CBS executive as \u201cguys in pajamas\u201d \u2014 couldn’t care less about degrees or titles but use their collective brainpower to poke holes in the New York-Washington gatekeepers.<\/p>\n
A fire-breathing Rush Limbaugh or snapping Bill O’Reilly might not receive many honorary doctorates, speak at Ivy League commencements or carry off the Peabody Award. Yet they come off as no more opinionated than an anointed Peter Jennings or insider Bill Moyers \u2014 and a lot more honest about their own politics and the medium in which they work.<\/p>\n
If the left wishes to curb the influence of the new prairie-fire media, the answer is not to subsidize an Air America, the failing liberal talk-radio network. There is no need to lure Al Gore back into the picture, or to pour more George Soros money into another moveon.org-like Web site.<\/p>\n
Instead, liberals themselves must begin balking at the infusion of their political views in the mainstream media. Once the public again trusts major news outlets to be objective, media bias will no longer be news.<\/p>\n
\u00a92005 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The recent Dan Rather and Newsweek controversies hardly seem connected. But on closer examination, both incidents symbolize what has gone wrong with traditional news organizations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[789],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-18A","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3577,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/alls-fair-in-love-and-talk-radio\/","url_meta":{"origin":4376,"position":0},"title":"All’s Fair in Love and Talk Radio","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 23, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., caused a stir recently when she criticized talk radio for its role in stopping the recent immigration bill. Talk radio, she lectured, \"pushes people to . . . extreme views without a lot of information.\" Feinstein then went on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2007"","block_context":{"text":"July 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/july-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7272,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-truth-drips-out\/","url_meta":{"origin":4376,"position":1},"title":"The Truth Drips Out","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 1, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ NRO's The Corner\u00a0 For over a year and a half the White House successfully withheld communications between public servants, apparently in hopes that the death of four Americans in Benghazi would not become an issue in the 2012 election (at the eleventh hour CNN\u2019s Candy\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Benghazi"","block_context":{"text":"Benghazi","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/benghazi\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4593,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-fall\/","url_meta":{"origin":4376,"position":2},"title":"The Fall","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 24, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"A bankrupt generation is fading away. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Dan Rather's initial, furious street-side defense of an amateurish forgery \u2014 smug, huffy, self-righteous \u2014 brings to mind one of those bad movies about the Paris barricades, especially the grainy, black-and-white shots of powdered and wigged aristocrats\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2004"","block_context":{"text":"September 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/september-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6052,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-brief-history-of-media-bias\/","url_meta":{"origin":4376,"position":3},"title":"A Brief History of Media Bias","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 12, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Who said that newspapers are supposed to report the news in an objective and fact-based way? by Bruce S. Thornton Defining Ideas The revelation that the Department of Justice acquired and read the phone records of Associated Press editors and reporters does not change the obvious fact that the mainstream\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3553,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/no-more-anonymous-please\/","url_meta":{"origin":4376,"position":4},"title":"No More Anonymous, Please!","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 20, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The New Republic\u00a0magazine recently ran into big trouble for publishing a first-person account of military savagery in Iraq. The author, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, used the pseudonym \"Scott Thomas\" to write of the debasement of war that he claims he saw in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "August 2007"","block_context":{"text":"August 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/august-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3776,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/liberals-gone-wild\/","url_meta":{"origin":4376,"position":5},"title":"Liberals Gone Wild!","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 23, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Why do Republicans drive leftists so crazy these days? Liberal democrats are beginning to sound like rowdy students on spring break, shrieking and exhibiting themselves on camera. Consider some of the recent rabid outbursts by once sober, old-guard politicians. West Virginia Sen. Jay\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2006"","block_context":{"text":"October 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/october-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4377,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376\/revisions\/4377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}