Media Navel Gazing In Ny - Road to the Middle Class

THEY HAD A navel-gazing session on new media vs. old media today at the Museum of Television and Radio Media Center in NYC, blogged by Jeff Jarvis and also attended by Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt said

I came away impressed by the talent and seriousness of the news professionals, but also convinced that they simply will never see that the source of their dissolving credibility is the ideological imbalance in their journalist workforce. I brought this point up a couple of times, but it was rejected as was the relevance individual writers/reporters/editors' political positions, voting records, and world views.

The problem is trust, Hewitt went on to say on his radio show, and the problem with the MSM is that the center-right audience of the MSM does not feel that it gets a fair hearing from the MSM. So they are drifting away.

Hewitt also planted a bomb by saying that

that the biggest sustained audience in broadcast is Rush Limbaugh at 20 million a week and because those people trust him. He says Rush is rebranding himself as �America�s anchor in contrast to drive-by media.�

Rush is important because he created his format and his audience himself, Hewitt said. Walter Cronkite happened along as just the right guy in the right place at the right time. But Rush has created something that they said couldn�t be done.

Why won�t the MSM admit their bias and become �transparent?� What do they gain by their absolute claim of objectivity? I suspect the answer is that if they admitted their bias then they�d have to hire people from the other side of the room. That would be OK; it might after all be interesting to have the odd conservative knocking around the newsroon. But it would mean less jobs for them and their pals. That is the real sticking point. It�s about the jobs and the glittering prizes.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

mysql close 0