Once upon a time, two highly respected denizens of two of Washington’s toniest think-tanks got together and wrote a book. It was a wonderful book, full of truth and insight and actually made the claim that, no, in fact, both sides don’t do it. Only one side does it. The Republican side. And what they do is throw sand and wrenches into the gears of Government for nothing more than self-aggrandizement. Yet, despite all the popular press and Internet buzz this book generated, none of the Sunday talk shows have had them on to discuss their thesis. How curious for the Librul Medya Impyre.
Ornstein … confirmed that the book’s publicity people had tried to get the authors booked on the Sunday shows, with no success.
“Not a single one of the Sunday shows has indicated an interest, and I do find it curious,” Ornstein told me, adding that the Op ed had well over 200,000 Facebook recommends and has been viral for weeks. “This is a level of attention for a book that we haven’t received before. You would think it would attract some attention from the Sunday shows.’
Ornstein also noted another interesting point. Their thesis takes on the media for falling into a false equivalence mindset and maintaining the pretense that both sides are equally to blame. Yet despite the frequent self-obsession of the media, even that angle has failed to generate any interest. What’s more, some reporters have privately indicated their frustration with their editorial overlords’ apparent deafness to this idea.
Oh if only there were a real Conservative Media Empire out there!
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Librul Medya Buble already in progress!
I have said this several times since November 2000. It would have been a darn sight better if Mr. Ornstein and Mr. Mann had noticed the development of this problem earlier. Kevin Phillips did and his voice was drowned out by journalists and think tankers who failed to notice that “conservative thinking” was drawing radical lines to blot out widening democratic thoughts. With false equivalencies, a blatant aversion to truth-telling and “both sides do it” mumbo jumbo, the public citizenry is divided between frozen minds and disheartened minds.
Methinks Ornstein and Mann are too little to late.
above: too little too late, sorry
Book publicity is never an easy endeavor to be sure. Especially now during the general decline of the book industry. But it might be interesting to note that Mann and Ornstein’s publisher, Basic Books, is an imprint of Perseus Books Group, which was at one time part of HarperCollins, which is a subsidiary of the mass media conglomerate you reference – News Corporation. Perseus is now “independent.” I don’t think it is, technically, a part of the mass media empire, but it certainly isn’t disconnected from the private equity empire. That’s neither here nor there, just a matter of note that comes to mind.
Agreed, Palli. It certainly didn’t take a Mann and Ornstein analysis for anyone to realize what has happened to media in America. Howling about the “liberal media” has taken its toll and shifted much of the mainstream news outlets to the right of center. PBS is a notable example for declining quality in its news coverage (their Wisconsin protest coverage was deplorable) – ironically, conservatives are all about axing PBS.
I am not at all surprised that Mann and Ornstein are having trouble promoting their book. But even if they were to get some good interviews, my guess is the questions asked would be neutralizing and meaningless. Even with all the media criticism out there in recent decades, the media hasn’t responded to much. It doesn’t have to.
Responsible journalism, investigative journalism, critical journalism… are all expensive: not profitable to undertake, not profitable to admit that standards are substandard.
The media is consolidated at the highest level of national news that regional and local stations pick up religiously. I noticed this, along with most thinking people forty years ago when I saw the same headlines being delivered to me in Time, Newsweek, WSJ every week. The idea is to create the appearance of a natural divide, so that, A) news is created and B)more media ads have to be generated and C) an appearance of “balance” is created no matter how one sided the issue is.