NOTE: Commentary from Jon Friedman at Marketwatch
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Someday, cultural historians will look back on the early 21st century and speculate about what killed the credibility of America’s so-called liberal-media elite.
They will ask, Were the wounds self-inflicted or the product of a methodical plot?
Make no mistake about it. We did this to ourselves.
As a card-carrying member of the leftist media near-elite — alas, I’m not nearly rich or famous enough to be regarded as a 100% elitist — it pains me to see my brethren sinking like the sun in the west. But we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
We’ve been out of touch with what people on the streets are thinking. The problem is twofold. We didn’t care to listen to them, and by the time we heard them we had missed the opportunity to break the story and inform the public. We were followers, not leaders.
In the 20th century, the two biggest media triumphs were exposing the Vietnam War as a failure and the Watergate-soaked corruption of the Nixon administration. In those instances, heroic reporters had their ears to the ground. That’s the difference between then and now.
To be objective — like everyone says the media ought to be, but seldom are — and blunt, let me post this simple question: Why should anyone believe us any more?
Our pledge to be on top of the news now rings as hollow as one of blustery New York Jets coach Rex Ryan’s promises of taking his middling team to the Super Bowl.
We did ourselves in by failing to shine a light on big stories involving ordinary Americans. Were we ignorant about the underlying causes of the news? Or blissfully elitist?
Sorry to say: Yes. And yes.
Let’s take three major examples.
The economy
You could argue that President Obama was swept into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in 2008 on the wings of a magnificent populist surge. But the media were slow in realizing that Main Street was hurting a lot worse than Wall Street shortly after Barack Obama took office.
In the aftermath of Obama’s unlikely and inspiring victories over Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries and then Sen. John McCain in the general election, the new U.S. president demanded the nation’s respect. He also deserved the benefit of the doubt in unwinding George W. Bush’s handling of the economy, Iraq and Afghanistan. Fair enough.
But why did journalists take so long to see that the new president’s administration was in over its head in its stewardship of the economy?
The tea party
The tea party movement was another example of the mainstream media’s failings. Liberals, laughing them off as extremists, dismissed the tea party because they didn’t agree with their politics. Big mistake.
As a result of their biases, reporters didn’t understand that the tea party was a compelling story because the organization’s members represented a large number of disenfranchised voters. That fact alone qualifies the tea party as something worth chronicling in a serious way.
This kind of journalistic intolerance is inexcusable, even in polarized 2011 America. But serious journalists dropped the ball because they let their political bent get in the way of objectively reporting the news. They missed a very big and interesting story. Lesson for the reporters: You don’t have to vote for Michele Bachmann & Co., but you should take the time to understand why so many people support her.
Occupy Wall Street
Ultimately, the media failed to understand the underlying reasons why something like the tea party could flourish. You’d think they might have learned their lesson by the time the Occupy Wall Street movement began to gain traction over the past few weeks. I’m as guilty of negligence as anyone. I and so many media stalwarts work in Manhattan, for heaven’s sake. We have no excuse. It’s not as if all this discontent had been brewing in some outpost like St. Louis before overflowing on national television.
Reuters A sign posted by the Occupy Wall Street campaign demonstrators stands in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street in New York.
Once again, we shrugged off the protestors as members of the fringe, not as angry Americans who had something substantial to say about the depressing state of the union.
Many journalists still don’t know how to cover the movement or even come to terms with it. Is it a social movement? Is it a touchstone of a new counter-culture? Are the protestors idealistic, aimless or admirable? We can’t seem to make up our minds.
On Monday, the widely read Poynter site publicized that Salon took the Washington Post to task for choosing an image of a bearded protestor “seeming to assault a cop to illustrate a movement that has been overwhelmingly — almost without exception — nonviolent.”
Hopefully, we in the media elite — and yes, the near-elite, like me — can get it together the next time.
MEDIA WEB QUESTION OF THE DAY: Are the “liberal media” on the run in 2011?
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