They just don't get it

This article fully illustrates the problem with old media and its genesis in the journalism schools of America. Rather than studying their customers to find out what kind of product they want, they look at the world from their skewed viewpoint and try to figure out how to respond to something that doesn't exist.

When you read this

"Big Journalism cannot respond as it would in previous years: with bland vows to cover the Administration fairly and a firm intention to make no changes whatsoever in its basic approach to politics and news. The situation is too unstable, the world is changing too rapidly, and the press has been pretending for too long that its old operating system will last forever. It won't."

you think perhaps they're finally getting it.

Then you read this

Which seems more plausible: the "cultural divides that have increasingly defined American politics," as Brownstein put it, will also begin to define American media, or... Big Media will successfully hold itself back from politics, and the major news sources will remain non-aligned, officially neutral? The first prospect means a radical restructuring is due (or maybe it is already underway.) Certainly leaders in Big Journalism will try to remain non-aligned, but do they even have that power? As we know from politics, if you don't watch out you can be defined by your opponents. Opponents want to define the national press as the liberal media, and they are well along in their cultural project, which does not require the participation of journalists.

and you realize, No!, they don't get it!

If there are any journalists reading my blog, allow me to disabuse you of a treasured notion. "We" are not "defining" the media. The media defines itself by its actions. The sooner you learn that lesson, the sooner you will be on the road to recovery.

This blog exists precisely because journalists are in denial. You need look no farther than Dan Rather's despicable attempt to use forged documents to smear a sitting President (and the NY Times' stunning headline in defense of Rather's false story, "Fake But Accurate") to see the bias clearly on display. If you can't see it yet, look to the NY Times' story, in collaboration with CBS, to smear the President with the "explosives" story, right before the election. If that still doesn't convince you, study the coverage of the Swiftvets' story - biased, one-sided and entirely pejorative.

So what remains after all that? The cultural right, in its struggle with the liberal media, feels that it is on the ascendant. Participants there are primed for more action. News and editorial decision-making are thrust into the political arena itself as potentially explosive "issues." This expansion of the political into the realm of "news" and commentary coincides with greater transparency for the big news combines, which are more successfully scrutinized than they have ever been. Various layers of protection once kept journalists from the knowledge the public had of their mistakes. That layering seems gone now.

Note how the "layers of protection" kept knowledge of journalistic "mistakes", not bias, from the public. The entire tone of the paper, which purports to be a calm analysis of the future of journalism, is written from a presumption of objectivity in journalism. Only Fox News is biased, but perhaps other media will have to become biased as an offset to the biases of Fox.

This is what passes for intellectual honesty in journalism school.