{"id":154,"date":"2004-09-19T18:18:19","date_gmt":"2004-09-19T23:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=154"},"modified":"2004-09-19T18:18:19","modified_gmt":"2004-09-19T23:18:19","slug":"msm-loses-its-power-to-swing-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=154","title":{"rendered":"MSM Loses its Power to Swing Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most notorious lines of the 2004 campaign season came to us<br \/>\nin Mid-July when Evan Thomas, the Assistant Managing Editor of<br \/>\nNewsweek, said: &#8220;Let&#8217;s talk a little media bias here. The media, I<br \/>\nthink, wants Kerry to win. And I think they\u2019re going to portray Kerry<br \/>\nand Edwards \u2013 I\u2019m talking about the establishment media, not Fox \u2013<br \/>\nbut they\u2019re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and<br \/>\ndynamic and optimistic and all. There&#8217;s going to be this glow about<br \/>\nthem is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them,<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s going to be worth maybe 15 points.<\/p>\n<p>Thomas&#8217;s admission validated the charges made in Bernard Goldberg&#8217;s<br \/>\nbook <cite>Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the<br \/>\nNews<\/cite>, and capped waves of evidence from recent sociological<br \/>\nstudies by the Pew Foundation, scientists at UCLA, and others that<br \/>\nhave scrutinized the establishment that the bloggers call &#8220;MSM&#8221;<br \/>\n(Main-Stream Media).  All the evidence shows that the MSM is extremely<br \/>\nleft-wing compared to the U.S. population as a whole. Content analysis<br \/>\nhas repeatedly demonstrated how this bias both distorts public<br \/>\nperception of specific issues and makes most Americans grossly<br \/>\nmis-estimate where the political center of popular opinion actually<br \/>\nis.<\/p>\n<p>But the reaction to Thomas&#8217;s admission from Republicans and<br \/>\nconservatives was more weary than angry.  They have been wrestling<br \/>\nwith the reality of pro-Democrat and left-wing bias in the MSM since the<br \/>\ncounterculture wars of the 1960s.  Ironically, however, Thomas&#8217;s<br \/>\npublic admission may have come just as the MSM&#8217;s power to reframe issues<br \/>\nand swing national elections was suffering a critical breakdown.<\/p>\n<p>Part of what I&#8217;m talking about the Ra<sup>th<\/sup>ergate<br \/>\nforged-documents scandal, of course.  It is not yet resolved as I<br \/>\nwrite, ten days after the original <cite>60 Minutes II<\/cite> story<br \/>\nand a week after the evidence of crude fakery became undeniable to all<br \/>\nbut the most blinkered Bush-haters.  Dan Rather is still hanging<br \/>\ntough, and the editorial position of the <cite>New York Times<\/cite><br \/>\nis still &#8220;Fake But Accurate&#8221;.  But the longer the holdouts cling to<br \/>\ntheir forged evidence, the more damage they will take to their<br \/>\nreputations, with effects that will go beyond the current election<br \/>\ncycle.<\/p>\n<p>Just the prompt effects of the scandal are interesting.  The most<br \/>\nobvious one is that John Kerry now seems headed for a Dukakis-like<br \/>\nthrashing in the presidential elections.  As I write, the<br \/>\nanti-Bush-leaning <a href='http:\/\/electoral-vote.com\/'>Electoral Vote<br \/>\nPredictor<\/a> website is projecting Bush at 331 electoral votes and<br \/>\nKerry at 207.  The site notes that this is the most lopsided spread<br \/>\nsince it was launched.<\/p>\n<p>There are many reasons besides Ra<sup>th<\/sup>ergate that Kerry is<br \/>\nlosing so badly.  He&#8217;s a pathetically weak candidate &mdash; a lousy<br \/>\nstump speaker with no program and a nearly nonexistent legislative<br \/>\nrecord, who ran on his Vietnam service only to have that prop knocked<br \/>\nout from under him by former crewmates and superiors who accuse him of<br \/>\nhaving been cowardly, opportunistic, and unfit for command. In fact,<br \/>\nKerry has no discernable political base of his own at all; his entire<br \/>\nappeal comes from not being George W. Bush.<\/p>\n<p>But Kerry&#8217;s weaknesses, glaring though they are, are not the<br \/>\ninteresting part of the explanation.  It&#8217;s the MSM&#8217;s inability to<br \/>\ncover them up and make them a non-story that is really<br \/>\ninteresting. The attempt to present Kerry and Edwards as &#8220;dynamic&#8221;,<br \/>\n&#8220;optimistic&#8221; and &#8220;young&#8221; to which Evan Thomas admitted has mostly made<br \/>\nthem look vacillating, frivolous and jejune instead.  CBS, the New<br \/>\nYork Times, the Boston Globe and the other centers of the MSM had also<br \/>\nbeen trying very hard to bury and discredit the Swift Vets;<br \/>\nnevertheless, <cite>Unfit For Command<\/cite> is now the #1 nonfiction<br \/>\nbestseller in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>Nor were the MSM, despite a visible effort to do so, able to<br \/>\nsuppress the evidence that Dan Rather&#8217;s anti-Bush memoranda had been<br \/>\nforged.  In fact, as I write they are proving unable to defend even<br \/>\nthe exculpatory fiction that Rather was an innocent dupe. The fact has<br \/>\ncome out that CBS was told in advance that two of the six documents it<br \/>\nhad were almost certainly bogus by its own examiners, and then witheld<br \/>\nthe other four from expert scrutiny and ran with the story anyway.<br \/>\nThe implications of that fact are being now dissected not just on<br \/>\npartisan right-wing websites but out where the general public can see<br \/>\nit.<\/p>\n<p>There has been a lot of talk since the Ra<sup>th<\/sup>ergate<br \/>\nscandal broke that the rise of the blogosphere made all the difference<br \/>\nthis time around.  And sharp bloggers fact-checking the mainstream<br \/>\nmedia made all difference in Ra<sup>th<\/sup>ergate itself, there is no<br \/>\ndoubt about that.  But Ra<sup>th<\/sup>ergate is only part of a larger<br \/>\npicture that goes back through the Swift Vets at least to the Jayson<br \/>\nBlair scandal, and amidst the peals of blogger triumphalism I think<br \/>\nit&#8217;s time to pull back at this point and get a little perspective.<\/p>\n<p>As an immediate reality check, the bloggers had very little to<br \/>\ndo with the success of the Swift Vets&#8217; book.  It is indeed remarkable<br \/>\nthat the Swift Vets were able to get their story past the big-media<br \/>\ngatekeepers, but nothing that the gentlemen at<br \/>\n<cite>InstaPundit<\/cite> or <cite>Power Line<\/cite> or <cite>Little<br \/>\nGreen Footballs<\/cite> uttered can have had much influence on that.<\/p>\n<p>For a more comprehensive explanation, I think we need to look at<br \/>\na couple of trends that are larger than the rise of the blogosphere<br \/>\nitself, and which actually drove that rise rather than being driven<br \/>\nby it.  One of these is obvious: the plunging cost of communication.<\/p>\n<p>Before the Internet and cheap long-distance phone calls, pulling<br \/>\ntogether a cooperative network large enough to produce and back<br \/>\n<cite>Unfit For Command<\/cite>, or to perform forensic analysis on the<br \/>\nRather memos, would have been an extremely expensive and long-drawn-out<br \/>\noperation.  The market for ideas had a much longer clearing time then.<br \/>\nIn fact it is rather unlikely these sorts of organization would even<br \/>\nhave been attempted more than a decade ago &mdash; everybody&#8217;s perception<br \/>\nof the time and money cost would have been prohibitive.<\/p>\n<p>Other forces are in play as well.  One is that people are less<br \/>\nwilling than they used to be to derive their identities and a static<br \/>\nset of political affiliations from the things about themselves that<br \/>\nthey can&#8217;t change.  Your family&#8217;s politics is a far less important<br \/>\npredictor of your vote than it was a generation ago (which, among<br \/>\nother things, is why conservative talk of a &#8220;Roe effect&#8221;, of liberal<br \/>\nabortion supporters selecting themselves out of the population, sounds<br \/>\nso much like wishful thinking).  Union membership stopped being<br \/>\npredictive sometime in Ronald Reagan&#8217;s second term. Even traditional<br \/>\nracial and ethnic interest blocs seem to be crumbling at the edges.<\/p>\n<p>Increasingly, political power is flowing to consciously-formed<br \/>\ninterest groups that arise to respond to individual issues and survive<br \/>\n(if they survive) as voluntary subcultures. The Swift Vets and<br \/>\nMoveOn.org are highly visible examples of the trend.  Internet hackers<br \/>\norganizing against the DMCA and for open-source software is another.<br \/>\nIndeed, the blogosphere as we know it is a voluntary subculture formed<br \/>\nlargely from the reaction to the trauma of 9\/11.<\/p>\n<p>To people in these subcultures, traditional party and ideological<br \/>\nlabels are less and less interesting.  Case in point: Glenn Reynolds<br \/>\n(aka InstaPundit), the pro-Iraq-war, pro-gay-marriage,<br \/>\nanti-gun-control, pro-drug-legalization king of the bloggers.  Is he a<br \/>\nliberal Democrat with some conservative positions?  A South Park<br \/>\nRepublican? A pragmatic libertarian?  Not only do Glenn&#8217;s own writings<br \/>\nmake it difficult to tell, he seems to determined to flirt with all<br \/>\nthese categories without committing to any of them.  Other prominent<br \/>\nbloggers, including those who broke Ra<sup>th<\/sup>ergate, exhibit a<br \/>\nsimilar pattern.  The MSM, looking through a left-wing prism, sees it<br \/>\nas conservatism &mdash; but most bloggers despise the Religious Right<br \/>\nand Buchananite paleoconservatism as heartily as they loathe Noam<br \/>\nChomsky.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I think we need to look at what bloggers call the &#8220;cocoon<br \/>\neffect&#8221; and understand that it too is a special case of a larger<br \/>\nphenomenon.  Even among bloggers who describe themselves as liberals<br \/>\nthere is a widespread sense that the MSM has become a sort of cocoon<br \/>\nor echo chamber, in which left-liberal orthodoxy is shaped by a tiny<br \/>\nself-selected elite and never questioned because no alternatives are<br \/>\never permitted a serious hearing. Thus the MSM often experiences honest<br \/>\nshock, disorientation, and disbelief when it is forced into<br \/>\ncontact with actual reality.<\/p>\n<p>But it isn&#8217;t just bloggers who notice that cocoon.  So do<br \/>\nblue-collar workers, firearms owners, rural residents, and indeed<br \/>\nanybody who lives in &#8220;red state&#8221; America.  It wasn&#8217;t always like this;<br \/>\nbefore 1965 or so your average auto-worker in Birmingham and an<br \/>\neditorial-page writer in New York City might have disagreed on much,<br \/>\nbut they lived in the same political universe and spoke the same<br \/>\nlanguage.  The Vietnam War ended that; during and after it, elites in<br \/>\nacademia, show business, and the media embraced the preoccupations of<br \/>\nthe New Left even as heartlanders were rejecting them.<\/p>\n<p>The journalism schools went with them, and the MSM has been<br \/>\ndrifting steadily further out of touch ever since.  An index of the<br \/>\ndrift is the the way that the degree of trust Americans have in<br \/>\njournalists has plummeted since 1970. Today, survey instruments find<br \/>\nAmericans rate journalists lower in integrity and honesty then<br \/>\nused-car salesmen or lawyers.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a commonplace among analysts of American politics that the<br \/>\ndispute over Vietnam has been at the bottom of our culture wars ever<br \/>\nsince.  So there is some sort of completion in the fact that the<br \/>\ndisconnect between the MSM and the rest of America reached a critical<br \/>\nbreak while the MSM was attempting to boost on its shoulders John<br \/>\nKerry &mdash; the man who cofounded Vietnam Veterans Against The War,<br \/>\nwho met with North Vietnamese Communists while still a Naval officer,<br \/>\nand who described our involvement there as an extended war crime.<\/p>\n<p>A long-serving governor of Louisiana once boasted that he could not<br \/>\nfail of reelection unless he was caught in bed with a live boy or a<br \/>\ndead girl.  Thanks to Ra<sup>th<\/sup>ergate, George W. Bush has a lock<br \/>\non the White House unless he&#8217;s at least as seriously embarrassed<br \/>\nduring the next forty days.  Kerry&#8217;s approval ratings are hovering<br \/>\naround 36%.  It seems that the MSM cannot deliver Evan Thomas&#8217;s<br \/>\n15-point swing anymore &mdash; or, if it can, that the left-wing<br \/>\nDemocrats&#8217; base has dwindled to 20% of the population or less and the<br \/>\nDemocratic National Committee, too long swaddled in the media cocoon,<br \/>\nis in far worse trouble than it understands.<\/p>\n<p>Either way, the self-destruction of the MSM and the collapse of<br \/>\nJohn Kerry&#8217;s candidacy looks to me like no fluke. It is, rather, a<br \/>\nculmination of trends that have been building for three decades.  The<br \/>\ntrend in communications costs is not going to reverse.  Therefore<br \/>\nmedia gatekeepers will continue to lose power, voluntary subcultures will<br \/>\ncontinue to gain influence, and the MSM&#8217;s ability to set agendas will<br \/>\nsoon be one with the dust of history.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: A reader wonders if the MSM ever had the power to swing elections.  The Assistant Editor<br \/>\nof Newsweek thought it could deliver 15%.  Popular-vote margins in Presidential elections have often<br \/>\nbeen 5% or less.  What does that suggest?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most notorious lines of the 2004 campaign season came to us in Mid-July when Evan Thomas, the Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek, said: &#8220;Let&#8217;s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. And I think they\u2019re going to portray Kerry and Edwards \u2013 I\u2019m talking about&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=154\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">MSM Loses its Power to Swing Elections<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}