The Death of a Party

Howard Fineman on MSNBC.com bemoans the death of a party - the American Mainstream Media Party. Take a look at this excerpt:

A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.

Now the AMMP is reeling, and not just from the humiliation of CBS News. We have a president who feels it's almost a point of honor not to hold more press conferences — he's held far fewer than any modern predecessor — and doesn't seem to agree that the media has any "right" to know what's really going in inside his administration. The AMMP, meanwhile, is regarded with ever growing suspicion by American voters, viewers and readers, who increasingly turn for information and analysis only to non-AMMP outlets that tend to reinforce the sectarian views of discrete slices of the electorate.

Poor Howie and his cronies are really shook up by this whole C-BS scandal and the general feeling among the unwashed masses that the media can no longer be trusted to provide "fair and balanced" reporting (to coin a phrase). With so many blogs in operation, when an item is published or broadcast, you now have literally thousands of fact checkers who can jump on a story and expose the media nonsense in a matter of minutes.

The media doesn't like this kind of oversight, and in fact many of the media stars feel they are "above" this kind of oversight thanks to the journalism degree yellowing on their office wall. Since many bloggers don't have those precious pieces of paper on their walls, surely they must be ignored.

The media is now learning that they ignore the blogosphere at their own peril. Hopefully this new level of oversight will result in few crusades by the media and more genuine reporting.