John Nolte of Breitbart.com: “Obama’s greatest legacy might be destroying the media”

For those despondent about the malignant influence of the mainstream media, I bring you this item from Breitbart.com’s ever-sharp John Nolte:

 “Yes, the media won. It still pains me to say so, but the most dishonest, self-serving, narcissistic, un-American people in the world won. By picking up and running with Obama's cynically divisive and intellectually dishonest campaign culture weapons, the media successfully pushed a failed president over the second term finish line.

But at what cost?

The cost to America isn't small, but might work itself out over a couple of generations. The cost to the media, though, might (hopefully) be fatal.”

“What the media is winning are nothing more than a series of high-profile battles, but it is doing so in a way that represents an existential threat to themselves.

By every measure -- economic, credibility -- the media is dying a slow death from a poison it must ingest in order to win these battles, but a poison nonetheless. This poison has cost the media almost all of its credibility with the public, a problem that grows by the year.  This, naturally, delivers economic consequences.

Recently, The New York Times,  Reuters, and Time Magazine reported massive layoffs.  CNN is collapsing and its so-called savior has already embraced the network's most cancerous tumor. The broadcast networks are losing viewers by the day. Newsweek is no more. For years now, major newspapers have been shrinking in staff size while the daily product shrinks to the size of a Dennys' menu. Everywhere the word "bankruptcy" swirls.  

And it is mostly due to the poison of bias the media gulps by the bucket in order to push its agenda -- and that amount of poison has only increased with the arrival of Lightbringer.  Which means that the media's unswerving sycophancy for this man is nothing more than a faster form of suicide.”

"In my opinion, the process of self-destruction  is well underway."

For those who complain that the media is more overtly biased than ever, I say good. It assists in their fall from grace. The media has always been biased. Everybody is biased. But back in the heyday of broadcast journalism, where there only three networks, they were always careful to cover over their bias with a hazy gauze of faux-objectivity. This is why one-world-government enthusiast Walter Cronkite was called ‘the most trusted man in America’ while Keith Olbermann never was. Olbermann is too honest for his own good. 

A healthy news organization is forthright about its bias. However it tempers it with standards of conduct - things like don’t lie, don’t intentionally mislead, don’t mix commentary and news, etc. Today’s unhealthy media gets it half right. They are more honest about their bias than ever before but also have fewer standards than ever before. 

I am in agreement with Nolte that this contradiction will be fatal to them.

Comments

[Nicola T.]

Well we only have to see how the media has played over and over again the video of Mario Rubio drinking water out of a bottle.

[WiseGuy]

Maybe it's time conservative polititions learned that it is counter productive to talk to the media at all. Harper did this to great effect helping him win a majority. It's time for a new normal, where politicians make speeches and the reporters report on that.

[Bill D]

I find the author's lead here intriguing; there just might be something to it.
In the Canadian context we consumers and people outside the political realm have the same problems with our media.
Worthy of special mention when talking about media with an agenda and bias is the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., a state-owned entity at the national level. It's one thing for a privately owned broadcaster to express a particular POV and slant on events, but quite another for one which is paid for by taxpayers and is supposed to serve the public evenhandedly. The CBC should be shunned by viewers and listeners, and complaints made to government about this broadcaster's policies and behavior.