Noemie Emery
Liberal media on life support
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
June 2, 2009
At the White House Correspondents’ dinner a few weeks ago, ‘comedienne’ Wanda Sykes wished kidney failure on talker Rush Limbaugh as his just desserts for critiquing her hero the president. But it was the audience that was really on life support, a situation rued by itself but by few not in the business, and a few developments involving the New York Times, the industry flagship, would quickly prove why.
On May 17, Edmund Andrews wrote a piece in the Times about how the mortgage meltdown and fiscal collapse of last autumn left him over-extended, facing foreclosure, and broke. He blamed himself (which was nice, since as one of the Times’ economic reporters he should have known better), but also heaped blame on Alan Greenspan and others for his debacle, and of course, on then-President Bush.
Days after this, bloggers exposed the fact he had neglected to mention that his wife had gone bankrupt twice, once in the ‘90’s, and each time on a six-figure income, changing the story from one of hapless homeowners gulled by unscrupulous lenders to one of compulsive super-consumers who overspent wildly on things with which Bush and Greenspan had nothing to do.
On May 18, Maureen Dowd lifted 43 words verbatim from the blog Talking Points Memo to make the point (repeated in eight million previous columns) that George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney live only to lie and to torture, giving no indication in earlier versions that the words and the thoughts were not hers. Hit with the news that two of their stars either stole words from others or omitted key facts to give false impressions, the Times said in effect they had done nothing terrible; that mere bloggers had no standing to criticize; and even if they did something terrible, it didn’t matter, as they were The Times.
Ten years ago, this might never have surfaced, as the media giants, in their lockdown control of the presses and airwaves, seemed to have things their own way. Then the Internet emerged as a free and alternative center of power, a ‘press’ that looked at the press with the critical eye that the press turned on others, and an age of exposure began.
Skeptics took aim at the press and its doings. Blogs rose that put the Times under their microscope. Powerline and Hugh Hewitt took on local papers, which are now in some trouble. Instapundit pointed out double standards when and where they occurred. In 2004, the blogosphere bagged its first trophy, bringing down CBS totem Dan Rather, who had accused President George W. Bush of malingering while in the armed forces, based on documents from the 1970’s that turned out to be written on Microsoft Word.
For years, ‘60 Minutes’ exposed deceit everywhere except its own newsroom: Now the Internet was the ‘60 Minutes’ that policed ‘60 Minutes’, as Dowd, whose specialty is mocking people in power, is herself mocked and made fun of on numerous websites the minute her columns appear.
The audiences for newspapers and network news do not always overlap with those of the Internet bloggers, but a large group of the most informed consumers of news in the country were fed a diet of ridicule of the country’s conventional media giants, which began to bleed viewers and readership.
While Craig’s List eroded their financial base, the bloggers were chipping away at what remained of their moral authority, just as their bias and partisanship had become most pronounced. The result was a collapse on all fronts, as the traditional press became less believed, and less needed. The flaps around Dowd and Andrews are merely the latest embarrassments. And the ‘defense’ by the Times makes it worse.
Ten years ago, Dowd’s and Andrews’ self-serving transgressions would have gone largely unnoticed, but not now. They are damaged goods, as is the paper they work for, living on loans from a Mexican mogul, and facing a mortgage crisis---it may have to sell its expensive new building---to match Edwards’ own. Soon it may be a weblog itself, and the correspondents’ dinner a gala for bloggers. And in view of the class shown by The Times and the dinner, few will have reason to mourn.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
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