Friday, September 16, 2005

VDH Has Some Observations on the MSM

The MSM hamster just cannot figure a way off the treadmill.  Its need to hype every story, to exact the maximum dismay from every event, and to shiv Bush whenever possible are causing them to lose credibility with the American people at a rate which should have the suits upstairs very, very nervous. Victor Davis Hanson has observations:

New Orleans also confirmed how a 24/7 hyper media create and then deflate controversies of the day, from the Aruba embarrassment to Cindy Sheehan’s circus.

Thus reports of deaths changed by the hour — not by a magnitude of dozens, but by thousands. New alerts flashed that a toxic soup was nearly lethal to the touch even as we watched rescuers wade through it. We were assured that stagnant water would submerge the city for months, even as our screens showed dry, lighted streets, torrents pumped back out and pools evaporating under scorching heat.

Using its Iraqi template, the wired media’s one constant is not amazing human resilience but hyped gloom. Later corrections and downgrades seldom make the headlines like their past blaring inaccuracies.

For all the media’s efforts to turn the natural disaster of New Orleans into a racist nightmare, a death knell for one or the other political parties or an indictment of American culture at large, it was none of that at all. What we did endure instead were slick but poorly educated journalists, worried not about truth but about pre-empting their rivals with an ever-more-hysterical story, all in a fuzzy context of political correctness about race, the environment and the war.

Most journalists don’t have the depth or expertise to understand what they’re actually witnessing, and even if they did, the next story is coming so they need to be off. It’s like they’re addicted to tragedy, oblivious to their own decay as more and more of the American people turn away.

Posted by Matt on 09/16 at 08:21 AM
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