SwiftVets.com

[FlyLow]

Twilight of the Press Gods
The American Thinker ^ | 8/14/04 | Thomas Lifson
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=3752


The genie is out of the bottle. The best efforts of the mainstream media to blockade the story of Kerry’s lies about Cambodia, and the charges by the vast majority of men who served with him in the Swift Boat operations, have failed. Glenn Reynolds prints a telling letter from a reader who requests anonymity. Read the entire entry, but here are the key sentences:

...last night I was talking to a friend who is a hardcore liberal Democrat and is, in fact, a first cousin of a very well-known Democratic Senator. He was very upset about the Kerry-Swift Vet-Cambodia controversy. He blamed Kerry for the whole thing, saying he had set himself up for this problem by making Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign. Two things struck me about this. First, this is a guy who gets all of his news from the biggies - the NYT, NPR, and CNN - and yet he knew all about the story. That means the Big Media filter isn't preventing the story from reaching people. Second, he had concluded that Kerry deserves the criticism and is lacking in credibility. This is a guy who, if there were any yes-but talking points in defense of Kerry, surely would have stuck to them. This says to me that if Big Media is in the tank for Kerry, they may actually have hurt him by not covering this story. They've abdicated coverage of a story that is negative to Kerry to the Blogosphere, thus resulting in more damage to their favored candidate than if they'd reported on the story, but with an eye toward knocking it down. They can pretend the story isn't there, but they can't make blogs go away.

Glenn adds:

...they're damaging themselves as more and more people notice that they're ignoring it.Just so. Credibility, once lost, is difficult to re-establish. Ask Bill Clinton.

In April, I used the metaphor of a driver stuck in snow, who presses the accelerator, and finds the spinning wheels only melting more snow, making traction all the more difficult. The current efforts of the press to define Kerry’s lies as a non-event are destroying their own traction. The media eruption over far less serious charges about Bush’s National Guard service is too fresh in the recesses of most peoples’ minds. And, of course, Bush didn’t choose to run for re-election on the basis of his honorable, even brave service as a jet jockey, a highly dangerous occupation.

But it is summer now. So let me switch metaphors. The establishment press is facing its Gottedamerung – the twilight of the gods. For decades, god-like figures handed down their version of the truth from corporate Valhallas like the New York Times and CBS News. The public credulously accepted their writ on what is important and what is not important.

But god-like pretensions are dangerous, indeed, often fatal. Especially when combined with mono-maniacal convictions on the need for their point of view to prevail. Post-modernity, a concept beloved of the bien pensants, cuts two ways. The public is skeptical of anyone who pretends to be an authoritative gatekeeper of knowledge. Kerry, who has never cut much of a figure as a genuine, warm, empathetic human being, is an ideal target for citizen skepticism.

The establishment press is coming across as every bit as pompous and conniving as the man who married two centi-millionaire heiresses.

They are, in fact, destroying themselves. Their industry is in serious trouble. Circulation scandals have hit major newspaper publishers, while the scandal-free press can take little comfort in their declining readership. Network TV news is a shadow of its former self, and its future is very limited. CNN’s monopoly is shattered, and it boasts a poor fraction of the viewership of Fox News, the only cable news outlet fully covering Kerrygate with the same seriousness accorded Bush’s National Guard service questions.

The blogosphere is the camel whose nose, and now a good part of its neck, is under the tent. Leadership in coverage of the self-destruction of the Kerry Campaign is in the hands of Instapundit, Hugh Hewitt (guru to many of us), Powerline, Captain’s Quarters, Just One Minute, and many other bloggers.

Nobody had ever heard of Bob Woodward until Watergate. Afterward, he became a powerful brand name, and his and Bernstein's work inspired generations of new journalists. The same phenomenon is taking place today, and journalism will never be the same again. The big difference is that this time around, there is a technological revolution compounding the destructive force operating on the old media. Hurricane Charley has nothing on the winds of change now blowing away the old media practices and economics.

Future historians are going to find this election deeply significant for not just War on Terror policy reasons. This is a transformative election for the structure of political information.
_________________
EX-Helicopter driver & accomplished liar.
Wars fought, revolutions started, uprisings quelled, revivals organized,
assassinations plotted, governments overthrown, lead gospel singing,
tigers tamed, bars emptied, virgins converted, orgies organized.

[Navy_Navy_Navy]

[Fabius Cunctator]

FlyLow:

Very, VERY eloquent. I couldn't have written better myself. An excellent summary of the state of the so-called "mainstream" media.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator
USMCR – 1974 to the present.

"Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum; qui victoriam cupit, milites inbuat diligenter; qui secundos optat eventus, dimicet arte, non casu. Nemo provocare, nemo audet offendere quem intellegit superiorem esse, si pugnet." - F. Vegetii Renati Epitoma Rei Militaris, AD 390

[integritycounts]

Yes I agree with the author, and have said a much lesser detailed version myself.

The Truth is discovered, it is not created. The Media is attempting to create a story to fit their desires. Yet they cannot. The Truth will come out, as the Media should know.

The outrage over FOXnews is because when all the cable news was going with a story, Fox would out them.

At this point the mainstream media may be focusing on Fox, but in reality it is the Bloggers whom are Trusted source.

Either the News will shift, and focus on real journalism, without bias. Or they will become as outmoded as Betamax.

[JimRobson]

It'll take more than this to collapse the major media but it's a big chink in their armor.

Fabius Cunctator: Even though I was an altar boy, I still don't have enough Latin to translate your sig. I’ll bet it’s good. Care to give it to us in English?
_________________
ETN2 PTF2 (Littlecreek Underwater Demolition Unit 2 1963)

http://www.thewebplace.com/

[rbshirley]

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[Fabius Cunctator]

JimRobson,

Here is the requested translation, and the wisdom of this is just as valid today as it was when Vegetius wrote it over 1,700 years ago:

"Therefore, he who desires peace must prepare for war; he who desires victory must train his troops diligently; he who hopes for success must fight on principle, not by chance. NO ONE DARES TO OFFEND OR INSULT A POWER WHICH IS KNOWN TO BE SUPERIOR IF IT DECIDES TO FIGHT."

Written by Flavius Vegetius Renatus around the year 380 A.D. in his work "On the Military Institutions of the Romans", dedicated to the Emperor Valentinian II. Too bad the Romans of that degenerate age did not take his advice!

Too bad our own government doesn't take his advice, particularly the last sentence.

Although in general I am supportive of the DoD leadership, when they recommend transformation, restructuring, reform, etc of the military, I get very nervous. Politicians have been at this game for a while, and it generally means the new, reformed military, always smaller than the former establishment, has to do more with less of everything, including money. Doing this during war can be fatal, UNLESS war dictates changes in the force to make it more effective. Over the previous decade, our forces have become less effective, despite the valiant efforts of our troops, NCO's and junior officers. They are simply overwhelmed, and there doesn't appear to be relief in sight. Here, I blame our leadership - the flag officers, for just rolling over to get that extra star.

With the historical perspective I have gained in lots of study, I have found there are some interesting comparisons between the Roman military after the reforms (i.e. transformation of the military) of Constantine and our own, post-Clinton military, in which our most effective troops are the SF's, and our conventional divisions have lost their edge, have been enervated by this PC crap. Post-Constantine, the Roman military had about 600,000 troops, but many battles, except for Adrianople and the Frigidus River (a civil war at the end of the 4th century) were decided by armies numbering 10,000 to 15,000, by the "comitatenses", or Roman mobile army, mostly heavily armored cavalry. Read in particular the accounts of the battles fought by the Roman general Stilicho. The "limitatenses" or border troops were the descendants of the old 6,000-man legions, the Roman infantry, and degenerated into a peasant militia by the 420's AD. They rarely took part in the big battles. Instead of manning the old camps on the frontier, the military reform brought them back from the old "limes", or border, garrisoning cities and becoming more of a scourge to the local population rather than keeping the barbarian out. And, as Vegetius notes, Valentinian's predecessor Gratianus did away with the old discipline and took away the requirement to wear armor, helmets, etc., so that half-naked soldiers got wasted by Gothic archers. So much for the big army. The historian Zozimus in his "Historia Nova" writes of this two hundred years after the fact and attributes the loss of the Western Empire to these so-called reforms. In effect, we could have been looking at a two-tiered military, much as the Romans had in their last century of empire. Perhaps this war may mitigate this, but I fear it may only postpone it, if you have a strong willed SECDEF like Rumsfeld running the show then.

The lesson of this is simple: a capability once lost is difficult if not impossible to reconstitute. In the past there were calls to eliminate the carrier force. If we had done that, where would we be today, and would Congress be willing to allocate the billions of dollars needed to get our remaining shipyards to rebuild a carrier force, in how many years????? I think not. I worry about our army going too light, and losing the magnificent heavy armored capability it has; what's to say we may not need that in two decades or less?

Semper Fi, et vale!

_______________________________________________________

Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator

USMCR – 1974 to the present.

"Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum; qui victoriam cupit, milites inbuat diligenter; qui secundos optat eventus, dimicet arte, non casu. Nemo provocare, nemo audet offendere quem intellegit superiorem esse, si pugnet." - F. Vegetii Renati Epitoma Rei Militaris, AD 380

[JohM]

A little observation if I may, relevant but a little off topic.

Look at your everyday life, have you noticed that when comething comes that makes things more convenient it usually has a change in how the product you are wanting is delivered? WalMart is one example (large stores rather than many small downtown ones) or the Internet (buy books on line vs going into a store). Well in the biz that's called supply chain collapse. Walmart did it, Amazon.com did it, and now it looks like the bloggers are doing it too!

I have spent 10 of my 30 years in computers supporting supply chain reductions. So I am familiar with the concept. I never conceived however that blogging could be a supply chain collapse of news. If this genuinely is a reduction, and it has all the signs then the likes of NYT, ABC, CBS, et. al. are truly in trouble permanently. People like the DrudgeReport, Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn will become the norm and large printing consotiums like NYT will go the way of the buggy whip.

Accuracy in media does not require a printing press, but an adherents to pinciples. Many major dailies has long since thrown that one out the door, so long as they don't get caught! (e.g. Jayson Blair). So it may come to pass that 'papers' will be small groups of reporters each covering a speciality in a regional or national market 'printed' on a blog that you subscribe to (Hey they gotta feed the kids!). The Northern Alliance bloggers are an example of what I refer. (i.e. PowerLineblog).

Sorry for the diversion, back to your regularly scheduled program of blowing up the Myth....

JohnM

[Sisku Hanne]

Very interesting point, John! Seriously, you should expand on it and work up a nice article for submission.

Send the old media to the tar pits!