A Unified Theory of Rather

Hindrocket at PowerLine has developed a brilliant Unified Theory of Rather: "So we have entered a new era. We now know that our richest and most powerful news organizations are willing to blow themselves up -- to destroy their own credibility, once considered a news organization's most precious possession -- to achieve a political goal":

The fact that CBS was willing to barter away what remained of its reputation in exchange for an opportunity to help the John Kerry campaign requires us to re-examine our assumptions about the mainstream media, just as the emergence of the suicide bomber required us to re-examine certain assumptions about security. We never thought that a vast, powerful broadcast network would destroy its own reputation for political gain. Now we know that it can happen.

The landscape will never look quite the same again. Those of us who still value truth must look at the mainstream media in a new, more skeptical and critical way, taking nothing for granted. Because, like suicide bombers, the mainstream news organs will go farther to achieve their political goals than we ever imagined.

We don't know nothin' 'bout looking at the MSM in a "new" way.  We've been looking askance at Big Media for years.  But until the new technologies came along -- first talk radio, then proliferating cable news options and now our own medium of choice, the internet -- we weren't able to do much about it beyond blowing off steam by yelling at the TV, scribbling impassioned notes in the margins of newspaper and magazine articles and firing off the occasional letter to the editor. Comfortable inside their Pauline Kael Bubble, the alphabet networks and major dailies and weeklies had the field all to themselves, but no more. As we wrote here recently, 9/11 awoke more than one sleeping giant:

But 9/11 awoke another sleeping giant, one that may have been slouching towards some kind of cyberBethlehem waiting to be born even as world attention was focused elsewhere. We're speaking, of course, of the blogosphere. A virtual lamp beside the golden door, this new medium was a beacon to the virtual "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" in the wake of 9/11, giving voice to those who had been voiceless -- Iraqi bloggers, milbloggers, homefront bloggers and bloggers of every stripe, seekers of wisdom and truth who weren't buying what effete academic elites and mainstream media pack journalists were selling anymore.

Comments

[goomp]

When are the corporate personel who are in charge of advertising going to find a loss of viewers hurting their sales is the question? Soon I hope.