A Unified Theory of the Old Media Collapse

From The Weekly Standard, or actually, "The Daily Standard." See also Hugh Hewitt's specific suggestions of questions that all reporters ought to answer, so that prospective readers, listeners, and viewers can adequately judge their work.

Basically, Hugh Hewitt tells us that the MSM is the way it is because, in their zeal to reform themselves from their pro-segregationist past during the Civil Rights movement, they went from one unhealthy extreme to another, even less healthy extreme. This explains the shocking differences between media coverage of World War Two on one hand and Vietnam (and the present War Against Terror) on the other, and possibly explains why what Hewitt calls the "legacy media" went all-out to elect John Kerry in the last election (a campaign they, of course, lost).

I cannot read the comments that Hugh got for his "ten questions" (actually, six questions, one of which had five parts to it), so I am left with taking his word that the feedback he got for those questions was highly negative:

The outrage in response to my suggested disclosures from some bloggers was intense and immediate. One even suggested that posing such questions was incipient McCarthyism.

Let's everybody calm down here. A private citizen asking, for example, "For whom did you vote in each of the previous five Presidential elections?" is not the same thing as Senator Joseph McCarthy (D-WI) asking, "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" Furthermore, McCarthy's mistake was in assuming that he and the rest of the country were on the same page; his campaign consisted of trying to ferret out a coordinated conspiracy of evil men. (Little did McCarthy or his detractors realize that such a conspiracy actually did exist, much less its actual nature.) Hugh Hewitt clearly states that the MSM made an uncoordinated choice. I see no conspiracy hunting here, but merely an observation of how a like-minded group of people gained a control that they still do not wish to relinquish.

Even so, Hugh Hewitt's analysis is incomplete. Not only did you see the assembly of a permanently hostile press beginning in the late Sixties. You also saw a collection of cabals of men and women prepared to sacrifice even the truth itself to advance an agenda. Dan Rather's disgraceful, reckless (and, I still maintain, knowing) use of forged documents was not the first such episode. I recall the Sarin Gas story of 1998--and the letter-to-the-editor in The Wall Street Journal in which the two producers of that story, after Ted Turner had to fire them, spat and hissed, "We s-s-stand by our s-s-story!" Nor was the affair of the Killian Memoranda the last such story. Indeed, the distortions and willingness to lie go on and on. These people could easily have gotten jobs for Joe Hunt's Billionaire Boys' Club before its principals were finally brought to book for the two murders that the club committed in its lifetime. I quote from the Crime Library online:

Joe liked to persuade people that life was best lived and business best done according to what he called "paradox" philosophy. It was a combination of situation and utilitarian ethics: the ends justified the means, and one should do whatever had to be done to benefit oneself. From different perspectives, the same item or situation can have contradictory qualities: White is black and black is white. Everything depends on how you look at it. As long as there was a payoff, one could reconcile oneself to doing anything. Anything.

A paradox is anything you don't expect. That's straight out of the Greek, and comes from para it's not, and dokei what you think. And a central tenet of paradoxism--as Joe Hunt sold it and as the MSM (and also Islam) practice it today--is that it's acceptable to lie, so long as you know the truth and the lie will benefit your cause.

I don't know whether the Old Media will stay collapsed. I do know that I am proud to be part of its alternative.