Phil is right. Olbboy had the nerve to stand-up when nobody else with his kind of exposure did. He's also right about the effect of media consolidation has had on the free press of this country.
When Bush took office he signalled to the press corps that he would not tolerate too much criticism. If you say too much, you lose access to the "leaks," you lose access to the, "...a top insider said today," and he made that signal the day he caused Helen Thomas's seat to be reassigned from the front of the room to the back. Disapproving reporters would be punished.
News today is supposed to be profitable. To stay profitable then need to have stories to report. If they want the stories first, then news media has to play ball with the administration and they do. There are fewer reporters, declining budgets, and a greater tendency to sensationalistic reporting, if not true muck raking, to gain audience than ever before. As a result, independent investigative journalism has suffered markedly. What we have now are coiffed bobbleheads sweetly reading essentially re-worked press releases from their sources without questioning what those releases say or why. To do so would close access and thus lose viewers. There is always some criticism, some questioning, yet finding hardball interviews with story background investigation is nearly non-existent. The sound bite has become the news.
Bad, biased, journalism has always existed. I am not claiming that all of this is new. What I have not seen before is how perveasive it has become among the news organizations which used to have better standards and, admittedly, far more resources. One reporter doing the work of three and working on immediate deadlines, now that news is reported even by newspapers 24/7, has little opportunity to thoroughly investigate anything.
Still the old media continues to hemmorage viewers. Their CPMs continue to rise while nothing they do seems to encourage viewership. On the face of it, this is actually good news because it signals that the public seems to realize that traditional media is not fulfilling news needs. My concern is that many of that public isn't looking for news so much as an amen corner for thier own world view and today, there's a blog for every political opinion out there. FOX, one of the exceptions to the traditional media decline, provides exactly that. They pat their viewers on the back, reinforce their own perceptions, and skew every report to fit their viewing demographic. They do not challenge their viewership to question their beliefs, do not present criticism of their stories and editorials with anything other than designed-to-lose straw man arguments. Time was that media had more power than that and wasn't afraid to use it because they knew that they helped to form public opinions, not just mirror them.
When did Keith Olbermann become lord and master of TV journalism? They have more drama between their anchors than at the DNC.
