The Demise of the Mainstream Media

The families of those dead coal miners, in West Virginia, were dealt a low blow by a wildly spreading rumor picked up and published by the MSM. In their rush to be first with “The News” they inaccurately reported the trapped miners had been found alive. The rimor was wrong! The MSM was wrong! For three hours those miner’s families lived in joy and celebration only to learn, at the end of that three-hour period, that their loved ones were dead and had been dead all along. Only one man survived.

The pain, the anguish, was intensified, needlessly, by a media with no sense of humanity.

The MSM decries bloggers as being without editors, and filters, and fact checkers, and such. Well, how well did they, the MSM, do WITH all those filters?!

The media desperately needs to step back and take stock. They have spiraled down into a morass of hypocrisy, and less than sterling character, as a newsgathering and dissemination machine. They have become as politically driven as any politician on Capitol Hill. Their bias is smeared all over their publications and broadcasts. No longer do they tell us, the consumer, what happened. Now they must tell us what to think of what happened. It is as though they think the consumer of “news” is well, too stupid to understand the current events of they day, so they, the “informed and enlightened ones will explain it for us. That explanation is almost always wrapped in their bias, as it is spoon-fed to their readers, listeners, and viewers.

This is what we get when we have a constitutionally protected press. They answer to no one. Well, that constitutional protection is in peril and that peril is self imposed.

The New Media, the internet news organizations and the bloggers have managed to be so effective at presenting the truth of a story, or the untruth of a story, as the case maybe, that now, many Americans, and others around the world, turn FIRST for the news to the Internet. I do. Now, you would think that would be reason enough for a Mainstream Media organization to step back and reassess they way they do business. But, it is not. They continue in their outdated ways and then blame the Bloggers when they get it wrong. They claim the pressure the bloggers, and the Internet, places upon them to hasten their end product to the market, is the cause of their inferior product. If you are not a member of the MSM you can readily see the fallacy in this thinking. But they can’t. They are insular and arrogant. It is becoming their downfall.

Many newspapers find themselves in trouble these days. Their revenue is down. Their subscribers are falling off and their advertisers are seeking new and different vehicles for their advertising dollar. Many are turning to the Internet.

Any other business, faced with these same problems, would immediately begin to analyze the problem and make adjustments to the way they produce their product. But not the MSM. They continue, right along, in their downward spiral all the while blaming others, the New Media to be exact, for their troubles.

The print media has been on shaky ground for sometime now. It is not going to get better as we approach the demise of print reporting.

The electronic media can better adjust, and must, if they wish to survive in this information hungry period in our history.

The consumer of news is much more educated and sophisticated than in the centuries past. They no longer have one source for their daily diet of “news”. And they are using all the avenues open to them for their consumption of “news”. They have come to rely upon the Internet for the balance in their reporting their Old Media no longer supplies.

The consumer of the “news” no longer expects the reporter to “Change the World”, or “Make a Difference” as so many journalism students claim. That is no longer seen as their duty. Their duty, now, is to correctly report what happened and allow the intelligent, educated, sophisticated consumer to make up his, or her, mind about the causes and reasons behind a news event.

The MSM has yet to grasp that concept. Until they do, their demise is as certain as death and taxes.

Longstreet