{"id":177,"date":"2004-12-29T17:37:15","date_gmt":"2004-12-29T22:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=177"},"modified":"2004-12-30T04:18:47","modified_gmt":"2004-12-30T09:18:47","slug":"the-journalist-as-herd-creature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=177","title":{"rendered":"The Journalist as Herd Creature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In September 2004, well before the elections, I wrote an essay on<br \/>\nthe <a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?p=154'>collapse of<br \/>\nmainstream media influence<\/a>.  I predicted that the Rathergate<br \/>\nscandal and the Swift Boat Vets would lock up the election for George<br \/>\nW. Bush, despite the MSM&#8217;s most determined efforts to get Kerry into<br \/>\nthe White House. I related this to a long-term decline in MSM influence as<br \/>\nplunging communications costs erode its gatekeeper role, and predicted<br \/>\nthat decline would continue.<\/p>\n<p>(For anyone who came in late, &#8220;MSM&#8221; is how bloggers abbreviate the<br \/>\n&#8220;mainstream media&#8221;.  But that term is imprecise, because the category<br \/>\nactually excludes the contrarian\/conservative but mainstream Fox News<br \/>\nand includes certain niche media outlets such as National Public<br \/>\nRadio.  What MSM really refers to is what I have sometimes called the<br \/>\n&#8220;dominant media culture&#8221;.  The centers of this culture are the New<br \/>\nYork Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, ABC,<br \/>\nCBS, NBC, and CNN.  The MSM peddles news made by and for elite<br \/>\nbicoastal liberals.  One conservative commentator has aptly <a href='http:\/\/weeklystandard.com\/Content\/Public\/Articles\/000\/000\/005\/087nhhbq.asp'>described<\/a><br \/>\nthe MSM as an &#8220;echo chamber of left and further-left scribblers and<br \/>\ntalkers and self-reinforcing head nodders who were overwhelmingly<br \/>\nanti-Republican, anti-Christian, anti-military, anti-wealth,<br \/>\nanti-business, and even anti-middle class&#8221;, which indictment could be<br \/>\ndismissed as political ax-grinding if sociological studies by the Pew<br \/>\nFoundation and others had not consistently shown journalists and<br \/>\neditors to have exactly the voting and political-contribution patterns<br \/>\nthat description would suggest.)<\/p>\n<p>Two months later, my predictions appear to have been correct, and<br \/>\nhave been repeatedly echoed in postmortems by Democratic political<br \/>\nanalysts.  The wailing and gnashing of teeth in the MSM has been loud.<br \/>\nThe latest eruption is from Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis<br \/>\nStar-Tribune, in which he <a href='http:\/\/24hour.startribune.com\/login\/?goto=http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/stories\/357\/5158765.html'>frenziedly<br \/>\nattacks<\/a> the editors of one of the blogs that helped break the<br \/>\nRathergate scandal.  Coleman has been quite properly slapped around<br \/>\nfor his frothy, hysterical. ad-hominem rhetoric by both his <a href='http:\/\/powerlineblog.com\/archives\/009062.php'><br \/>\ntargets<\/a> and many other bloggers (<a href='http:\/\/www.americanthinker.com\/articles.php?article_id=4135'>here<\/a><br \/>\nis one representative shellacking).<\/p>\n<p>Coleman&#8217;s anger so possesses him that he stoops to casting<br \/>\naspersions on an opponent&#8217;s genital adequacy.  But spare him some pity<br \/>\nalong with your condemnation, because his rage transparently<br \/>\nsprings from fear &mdash; the fear that he&#8217;s being beaten at his own<br \/>\ngame of opinion-molding by amateurs, by bloggers, by (worst of all)<br \/>\n<em>Republicans<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>What Coleman is acting out on an individual level is the same rage<br \/>\nand fear that is rippling through the entire MSM.  This rage and<br \/>\nfear has three causes, intertwined but distinct and all readily<br \/>\ndiscernable in Coleman&#8217;s rant.<\/p>\n<p>First, the MSM is reacting badly to its loss of power.  Few people<br \/>\nwould claim now what <em>Newsweek<\/em> editor Evan Thomas did less<br \/>\nthan six months ago, that the MSM can swing a national election by 15<br \/>\npoints in the direction it wants &mdash; not when the 2004 elections<br \/>\nswung by at least three points in the direction it <em>didn&#8217;t<\/em><br \/>\nwant.<\/p>\n<p>Second, the MSM is acting from a genuine fear of the social<br \/>\nconsequences of the loss of its power.  Many of its influence leaders<br \/>\ngenuinely believe that conservatives are evil thugs bent on plunging<br \/>\nthe world into a theocratic, imperialist dark age, and that it<br \/>\nis their job to fight the good fight against this.<\/p>\n<p>Third, they are most terrified of all at discovering how out of<br \/>\ntouch they are.  In the past, your typical MSMer surrounded by other<br \/>\nMSMers has believed that he is mildly &#8220;progressive&#8221;, merely holding<br \/>\nthe opinions that all reasonable people hold and opposed by at most a<br \/>\ntiny and dismissable fringe of kooks and rednecks.  MSMers are more<br \/>\nundone than anything else by the discovery that the mainstream of the<br \/>\nAmerican population is rejecting them in droves for Fox News, talk<br \/>\nradio, and the blogs.<\/p>\n<p>The first two causes induce fear, but I think it&#8217;s the third one<br \/>\nthat tips it over into irrational panic.  Almost all the working<br \/>\njournalists I&#8217;ve ever met (and I&#8217;ve met boatloads of them) are herd<br \/>\ncreatures &mdash; they may talk about individualism and subverting the<br \/>\ndominant paradigm, but they have a very strong need to believe that<br \/>\nthey&#8217;re &#8220;of the people&#8221;, simply writing the things that 99% of the<br \/>\npeople would think and write if they were capable.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a short step from this belief to Coleman&#8217;s flavor of<br \/>\nquasi-paranoid ranting.  Anybody who doesn&#8217;t think like the MSM cannot<br \/>\nbe authentic, but must instead be a paid or suborned tool of evil<br \/>\nforces. Watch for this theme to show up more and more frequently in<br \/>\nthe next year as most of the MSM sinks ever-deeper into denial.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In September 2004, well before the elections, I wrote an essay on the collapse of mainstream media influence. I predicted that the Rathergate scandal and the Swift Boat Vets would lock up the election for George W. Bush, despite the MSM&#8217;s most determined efforts to get Kerry into the White House. I related this to&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=177\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Journalist as Herd Creature<\/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-177","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\/177","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=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}