Quote Originally Posted by Watcher In The Middle View Post
...The news media has over the long-term, cast themselves as the "Information Middleman", but they got both greedy and stupid about doing it, and they overdid it. If you want to be a successful middleman, honesty and integrity are EVERYTHING. And when you are in the middle and you find that you are "shaping" the news (even if only by appearance, and even if only to part of the audience), you have just started on that slippery slope down to the bottom.
True, I think. I cannot figure out how a bunch of nominally intelligent people cannot see what they have done to themselves in that vein.
...Basically, they are trying the same approach circa 1997-2004 that Microsoft tried to do with the Internet, which was run the Internet through the desktop, which MS just happened to control. Didn't work for them, no reason it's going to change this second time around.
Also true; I'm reminded of a quote from someone, can't recall who, on the demise of US Railroads; "They didn't realize they were in the transportation business, they thought they were in the railroad business." Interestingly, the major Airlines have more recently made the same mistake. Looks like the media is bound down the same path.
Finally, just as an observation, it seems to an outsider that the mainstream media seems to spend an inordinate amount of time picking at the US military, but the end result is that the military is much better for it (certainly in terms of the measure of public respect), while the news media seems to keep sinking even further into the depths of public disrespect. You think they'd figure it out after a while that they got the formula backwards.
Well, they told us if George Bush got elected, the nation would suffer from hubris...