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2004's Biggest Losers
How Dan Rather and the media's kings lost their crowns
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Wall Street Journal
Friday, November 12, 2004

It is often said that the only sure winner in American politics is the media. Amid GOP victory parties or the ruined dreams of the Kerry candidacy, the one constant is that the media marches on.

Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big. But it was more than a loss. It was an abdication of authority.

Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did so by choosing to go into overt opposition to one party's candidate, a sitting president. It stooped to conquer.

The prominent case studies here are Dan Rather's failed National Guard story on CBS and the front page the past year of the New York Times (a proxy for many large dailies). Add in as well Big Media's handling of Abu Ghraib, a real story that got blown into a monthlong bonfire that obviously was intended to burn down the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. I think many people thought the over-the-top Abu Ghraib coverage, amid a war, was the media shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Authority can be a function of raw power, but among free people it is sustained by esteem and trust. Should esteem and trust falter, the public will start to contest an institution's authority. It happens all the time to political figures. It happened here to the American Catholic Church and to the legal profession, thanks to plaintiff-bar abuse. And now the public is beginning to contest the decades-old authority of the mainstream media.

Two months ago, Gallup reported that public belief in the media's ability to report news accurately and fairly had fallen to 44%--what Gallup called a significant drop from 54% just a year ago. The larger media outlets have been pushing the edge of the partisanship envelope for a long time. People have kvetched about "spin" for years but then largely internalized it. Not in 2004. Big Media chose precisely the wrong moment to give itself over to an apparent compulsion to overthrow the Bush presidency.

This was the election that brought the reality of the Information Age to politics, not just the promise. Most of us, but especially voters in battleground states like Ohio and Florida, were engulfed with political inputs. TV commercials, canned phone calls, Internet ads, Web logs, partisan 527s, talk radio and of course cable news.

A survey by the Pew Research Center reports that over three years from January 2000, the percentage of people getting candidate and campaign news fell 9% for daily newspapers, 10% for network news and 5% for news magazines. The numbers rose, up to 4%, for cable news, the Internet and comedy TV shows (Jon Stewart's rise as a news authority figure is the court jester displacing the journalistic monarchy).

In a post-2004 election report, Pew and the University of Michigan jointly note that this past summer, 40% of Internet users pulled down political information, a significant increase over the 2000 election. And not merely, as is often assumed, to ride with their own political posses. "Wired Americans are more aware than non-Internet users of all kinds of arguments," Pew concluded, "even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions."

Maybe the networks and big dailies should try spinning in both directions, which is what the most sophisticated political consumers seem to want. But it's probably too late for that. Rather than be spun by large, faceless networks and newspapers, people now seem to want something more akin to a political conversation with the spinners operating Web sites?

Conservatives revel in the erosion of Big Media, believing on the basis of easily replicated studies that all news particles spin counterclockwise. But that begs the obvious question: Now what? With so many people withdrawing their trust from Big Media, where will anyone get what they used to call "news"?

In fact, it's too bad this abdication has occurred just as political opinions have become overheated by the kind of electronic technology deployed in the 2004 election. We really could use some neutral ground, a space one could enter without having to suspect that "what we know" about X or Y was being manipulated. The problem with being spun day after day by newspapers or newscasts is that it gets tiresome, no matter your politics. You end up having to Google every subject in the news (Guantanamo, gay marriage statutes, Tora Bora, the Patriot Act) to find out what's been left out or buried at the bottom.

But journalists have believed for 35 years that the highest purpose to which their authority can be put is to help achieve what Martin Peretz on this page Wednesday called "good outcomes." It's hard to see too many traditional media players opting for life now as brokers of mere information.

I'm not suggesting that Big Media has lost power. Anyone who can package and drive a particularized version of the news on that scale can move opinion, as clearly happened with Iraq the past six months. But these institutions are no longer viewed as authority figures as in the past; now they're just teams in the pro political league, like everyone else.

The real winners here are the politicians. Pig heaven for them. If much of the public (a margin large enough to decide elections) believes it no longer has access to a settled information baseline, an agreed-upon set of facts, then it's so much easier for the pols, using this new arsenal of high-tech info firepower, to manipulate a doubtful public and push it around with propaganda (they can demographically target ads to the TV screens in health clubs).

Here's a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem. Why don't we finally institute an American version of the parliamentary question period common around the U.K.? If the likes of Messrs. Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, Snow, Cheney and Bush had to appear before the House in this tightly regulated question-and-answer format, broadcast on C-Span, surely the public over time would acquire a clearer sense of which ideas are competing for their support and vote. Let's get to them, before they get to us.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

WSJ OpinionJournal

[Navy_Navy_Navy]

Woohooo! Another brick in the wall!

Great time to be alive - can't you just feel it happening?

What an excellent article!!!
_________________
~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother

[wwIIvetsdaughter]

Humpty Rather sat on a wall,
Humpty Rather had a great fall,
all the OLM's horses and
all the OLM's men
couldn't put Humpty Rather back together again!