November 17, 2008

Rupert Murdoch Drops the Hammer

In a lecture sponsored by the Australian Broadcasting Company, Rupert Murdoch called out the MSM. My favorite quote:

"Far from celebrating this citizen journalism, the establishment media reacted defensively. During an appearance on Fox News, a CBS executive attacked the bloggers in a statement that will go down in the annals of arrogance. '60 Minutes,' he said, was a professional organization with 'multiple layers of checks and balances.' By contrast, he dismissed the blogger as 'a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.' But eventually it was the guys sitting in their pajamas who forced Mr. Rather and his producer to resign.

"Mr. Rather and his defenders are not alone," he continued. "A recent American study reported that many editors and reporters simply do not trust their readers to make good decisions. Let's be clear about what this means. This is a polite way of saying that these editors and reporters think their readers are too stupid to think for themselves."

Thank you, Rupert.  When you compbine that with the fact that the MSM is in the tank for the Democrats, you have a bad combination.  There are lots of people who will blindly believe whatever the media tells them.  They stick to one source for all their news.  The opportunity for abuse is too large.

Now, the media is right aout this stupidity in one sense.  Too many people cannot distinguish between news and commentary.  Unfortunately, that line has been blurred in recent years by cable news programs that present a news story followed by commentary.  After a while, it all becomes globbed together as news.  That's why the Keith Olbermanns of the world are dangerous.  They know people think that what they say is news and they use that to effect.

This will probably never change.  People will still unfailingly believe the news and newsmen will use that notion to their advantage.  Bloggers and other non-traditional media will be the firewall stopping it from engulfing everyone.

Posted by: Steve L. at 02:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 336 words, total size 2 kb.

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
9kb generated in CPU 0.0098, elapsed 0.0415 seconds.
39 queries taking 0.0354 seconds, 62 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.