Great news…ridiculous analysis.
There have been a lot of bad days recently for what’s come to be known as the mainstream media — or MSM — but Monday was one of the worst.
New circulation figures showed that big city papers had lost as much as a quarter of their circulation in the past six months. And new TV ratings showed that CNN, the cable network that prides itself on news coverage down the middle, finished dead last in prime time against more partisan rivals like Fox News and MSNBC.
Are the two connected?
Yes, but not at all in the way described in this article. Politico, more often than not, behaves exactly like the MSM while fancying itself as cut completely from new media cloth.
Eric Alterman, a media columnist for The Nation, and a frequent critic of the MSM, thinks they are. “Nonpartisan news, and news aimed at a broad audience, doesn’t have the cachet, and therefore the consumer base, it once had,”
It transcends insanity to believe that the New York Times, WaPo, and the major news networks which are the cornerstones of the MSM are offering nonpartisan fare. And CNN may pride itself “on news coverage down the middle” but it, like the rest of its brethren, has been so far Left for so long that “the middle” is a very skewed notion indeed.
The reality is that the above-mentioned players, as well as the vast majority of newspapers in America, have been embarrassingly partisan for years. Most of them gave up even feigning impartiality when their lord and savior Barack Obama came on the scene.
The cliff-diving popularity of these “news” outlets has directly coincided with their transition from journalism to advocacy. Yes, this applies to CNN as well. There’s a vast difference between being a self-defined centrist organization and actually being centrist. While the occasional hard question will be asked by a CNN anchor, it’s also the network that fact-checked a Saturday Night Live skit critical of President Obama (still waiting for the first fact checking of the Bush and Palin skits, kids) and let Anderson Cooper gleefully refer to Tea Party protesters as “teabaggers”, thus revealing how he likes to spend his weekends.
CNN execs can play make-believe all they want, they’re growing gills just as fast as the rest of the MSM outlets that are swimming in the Obama Tank.
CNN President Jon Klein says he knows why those approaches work, and he’s not going to go there. “It’s the oldest trick in the book to trot out over-the-top hosts and put them on a cable-news show,” Klein told POLITICO in May.
There’s no doubt that the over-the-top, and politically partisan, hosts are having more success attracting viewers on nights when there’s no major news event. Acknowledging the low ratings, Klein told staffers on Tuesday, according to TVNewser, that CNN “refuse[s] to do the things that might get us a quick number or cater to the extremes that would alienate our core viewers.”
That explains giving Joy Behar a show at 9:00 PM on their sister network, Headline News.
Or keeping Zombie Larry King around to deliver the old school journalism with hard-hitting interviews of every leftist Hollywood celeb available at the time.
One of the biggest hallmarks of the Obama era is a massive disconnect between what his supporters (in this case, the MSM) want to believe is happening and, um, reality. Let the extremely partisan leftists in the MSM keep telling themselves this fairy tale. Blind to their prejudice, they’re also blind to the cliff’s edge that they’re inching toward daily.
They can either engage in some critical self-assessment or they can plunge into irrelevance.
But there will still be a party at Andy’s house that weekend.
