Media Stars Burning Brightly...and Then Out

Jed Babbin has a good piece at RealClearPolitics.com on the current state of the mainstream media:

Among the largest stars are the red giants, ten times or more the size of our sun. Over billions of years, as they burn themselves out and start to die, these stars begin to shine more brightly. Some, called miras, periodically brighten and dim before they - like the rest - collapse on themselves and then explode into nothingness. In that, the stars of the universe most closely resemble the stars of the mainstream media. The miras of the media, those such as the New York Times, CBS News, the Washington Post, are collapsing into themselves. And while they do, every two years they burn with a sudden intensity that still dazzles those who take them at their word.

As the fervency of the media's liberalism increases, the number of people who comprise their audience shrinks. The NYT, for example, lost about 20 per cent of its home town readers between 2001 and 2004. MSNBC - whose liberalism is beyond parody - is experimenting frantically with various reincarnations to bestir higher ratings without doing anything about its core liberal biases. Even the AP, once among the best sources of political news, has a tattered reputation. The rips and tears are self-inflicted, created by fabulously-biased Iraq coverage and stories such as its bizarre feature about then-Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' childhood, "...during the racially turbulent 1960s and '70s [in a neighborhood that] once banned the sale of homes to nonwhites and Jews."

Businesses with shrinking customer bases usually move heaven and earth to stop the hemorrhaging. But the media are so self-absorbed they think the problem is with their audience, not with them. Instead of news editors imposing more discipline on themselves and reporters, instead of editorial page editors recalibrating the shrieks that they substitute for op-eds, audience shrinkage has had the opposite effect. The wider audiences have been abandoned and the few constraints that existed as late as 2004 are gone. Conservatives sense something wrong in the media, but haven't really formulated either the disease or the cure. Michael Barone calls it an effort to delegitimize the administration. I think it's a disease called Bush Derangement Syndrome.

I think we'll likely see a more and more radical media as they fight and claw for attention from news consumers. Meanwhile, they will continue their burnout.