The media as arbiter may well be disappearing right before our eyes. It is now, I think, becoming so well understood that what is said in most of the the press or on most of the electronic media is nothing other than attempts by those who write and present the stories to continue the narrative of left-of-centre parties. It is not a universal, but the discount factor is getting larger the more obvious the distortions and lies have become. We on the right have known this for a long long time. That independents are catching on may be the big change now going on.
The evidence is tentative but there has now been the absolute necessity for Obama to walk back his attempt to lay blame for the embassy attacks on some obscure youtube video that no one had ever seen. No matter how much the media attempted to tell the administration story, the evidence that these were barefaced lies only meant that the more the media tried to support Obama, the more it was the media who were seen as liars themselves and the less willing many more than before have become to take the media’s word for anything.
And now with Romney’s 47% moment that was unanimously described across the media as the end of the Romney campaign, there has been an uprising on the right side of politics to argue that we here do not accept the media’s verdict and that the only problem with what Romney said was that he doesn’t say it often enough.
If at some stage media criticism simply no longer contains the sting it once had, which has for so long been a poison for the Republican side of the debate, you may begin to hear Romney say in public the kinds of things he has up until now saved for behind closed doors. If we get to the point where the views and reports of the The New York Times, Washington Post, ABCBSNBC and the rest are largely ignored and Romney is able to speak above their heads we will be in a kind of world in which more conservative views are sought while the leftist media are recognised as the shills they are for a discredited administration whose time is up. The media, because it has become so extreme, may be taking itself out of the game.
If you want to feel sick Steve read Peggy Noonan’s piece in the WSJ.
I find it extraordinary that in a dog-fight with Romney 1-2 ahead on Rasmussen and Obama 1-2 ahead on Gallup supposed ‘conservatives’ like Noonan and David Brookes drop depth charges.
They both have form supporting Obumma’s election in 2008.
And Romney appears to be gaining momentum again in the polls.
Brooke’s in particular is a Republican but in reality no friend of the Republican party.
Another moderate GOPer putting the boot into Romney on tv is Matthew Dowd.
The Republican Party would be much better off formally kicking these people out.
It would send such an effective message and I have no doubt that the benefit would handsomely overcome the harm.
One of the reasons so many joined the Tea Party is to rid the GOP of lefty big government moderates who sow confusion in voters’ minds about what the GOP stands for and how it is different from the Dems.
And that’s for good reasons – they are Dem lite – they’d have a more efficient big government is all.
JamesK
20 Sep 12 at 1:38 am
LMAO.
Pat Buchanan: “Barack Obama Is A Drug Dealer Of Welfare”
Politically incorrect in so many delicious ways….
Alex Pundit
20 Sep 12 at 1:42 am
We don’t have that much time left. Obambi’s made some quite significant gaffes, and still he gets covered for. If they can cover for him for just fifty more days, he’ll be home and hosed for his second term and the US will be fucked.
perturbed
20 Sep 12 at 2:10 am
The polls are making a lie of that fear perturbed.
After Romney supposedly again ended his campaign last week and Peggy Noonan criticised him heavily then as well, Romney was proven correct and he rallied in the polls and Obumma has taken a big hit on his foreign policy approval numbers.
Don’t believe the media.
It is designed to sap Republican voter enthusiasm and increase Dem enthusiasm.
JamesK
20 Sep 12 at 2:22 am
Notice how every time Romney commits a so-called gaffe, it’s not because he said Austrians speak ‘Austrian’, a ‘Budweiser’ instead of ‘breathalyzer’ or something moronic like that, it’s because he thinks out loud and tells truth? He’s never actually said anything that was dumb.
“I like to fire people”, “I don’t care about the poor”? All weren’t stupid, just politically incorrect. And they weren’t untrue either.
Alex Pundit
20 Sep 12 at 2:49 am
That’s not the way political parties work in the States, JamesK.
I have, in the past, been a registered Democrat, a registered Libertarian and a registered Republican. It’s just the box you tick on your voter registration form. No application form, no need to fork over any money, no approval from Party apparatchiks needed.
I could change my registration to Democrat right now, online, effective immediately, and go out and write scathing editorials about how I as a Democrat am against Barack Obama and start a “Democrats Against Obama” PAC, and no one could stop me. They couldn’t kick me OUT, because they’re not the ones who “allowed” me IN.
It’s not as big a Thing as it is in Australia.
sdog
20 Sep 12 at 3:16 am
sdog, one of the best things about Australia’s electoral system is the fact that you aren’t registered to a party affiliation when you go on the rolls. So nobody dares lay a finger on your electoral eligibility or try to keep you out of the booth, because they can’t be sure they won’t be shooting their own side’s foot.
I could change my registration to Democrat right now, online, effective immediately, and go out and write scathing editorials about how I as a Democrat am against Barack Obama and start a “Democrats Against Obama” PAC, and no one could stop me.
DO IT. (They might ping you on having previously been Republican, though. That would be the tipoff.)
perturbed
20 Sep 12 at 6:34 am
Sky News is becoming so obviously biased to the left. It’s maddening!
Sky just covered Romneys “hidden video victim gaffe” at length with interview clips of outraged citizens and then, presumably to ‘balance’, played edited Obama audio, – “we have to find ways to pool (I heard ‘pull’) resources ……so everybody’s got a shot.”
Nothing about REDISTRIBUTION!!!!
Anne
20 Sep 12 at 7:38 am
Agreed sdog.
It was poetic licence on my part!.
I like this:
House passes new Buffett Rule
lol
JamesK
20 Sep 12 at 8:08 am
I saw that too JamesK, just posted this comment about the same with some links I think are important for context.
After bitching to the world he doesn’t pay enough tax, the US Congress passes a law to allow Warren Buffett to pay whatever he thinks a fair amount of tax.
Yes, as it is named after the grandstanding tight-ass crony capitalist who is suing the US government so his companies do not have to pay their fair share, do you think he’ll be motivated to put his money where his mouth is?
Token
20 Sep 12 at 8:36 am
The Australian is becoming like the WSJ. The editoriral/commentaries are worth reading.
…and like the WSJ you have to take care with the news stories that are dogma from the hard left.
Token
20 Sep 12 at 8:40 am
As someone who works in that god forsaken industry, you’re on the money, Steve. Only a decade ago, in the English-speaking world at least, there was pride among journalists about their code of ethics, in particular the undertaking “not to suppress essential facts nor distort the truth by omission or wrong or improper emphasis”. In Australia, that went out the window in the 1990s when The Age under Andrew Jaspan was forced by its owners to undertake serious editorial cost-cutting, which cleaned out most most of the senior writing staff and led to a culture that glorified opinion as a substitute for the footslogging capital-intensive business of turning up new facts. When that was combined with the untouchability of FXJ staff under its Charter of Editorial Independence, FXJ become the industry-leading pioneer of allowing journalists to indulge their political bias — leftist almost without exception in this industry — which includes the selection of information to promote that bias and the suppression of information that damages the political cause. This is unprecedented in my working life. It is less obvious at most News Limited publications, but only because (with the exception of The Australian) they follow a high-sales tabloid formula (400-word limit, etc) designed to be read on public transport. In the case of Fairfax, the fact that the company’s products are no longer believable is destroying the company; there was no-one there to stop this professional corruption because the senior staff with that intellectual property were sacked by the company in the redundancies of the 1990s and early 2000s. A new round of redundancies in the past few weeks have left the company even more dependent on junior staff. Other media, like the ABC, which has a public service silo culture like Fairfax’s, have followed the FXJ lead, but there are no consequences because there is no market discipline. Impartiality is now a lost art; a new company that rediscovers it will eventually reclaim the media spend that Fairfax has foregone. The same syndrome is destroying media like the NYT and the UK Guardian; I have no explanation except that their owners have willingly placed their editorial staffs in silos protected from market discipline.
Tom
20 Sep 12 at 8:41 am
Note that hard lefty Norrington ignored this gaffe by the Sun King which is much worse that Romney’s faux mistake:
At least the Australian media gave Goose hell when it was found out how little he actually knew of the stats he was peddling.
Token
20 Sep 12 at 8:42 am
Steve
Thanks for putting so eleoquently what I was trying to say in my comment on the open thread last night.
For manymotnths now I have been trying to point out here that the MSM has long lost its ability to do anything but turn off voters from left wing causes. If the MS was so powerful, how did John Howard stay in power for so long and alter so many political paradigms?
It is good to see the Cat now converted to my thinking.
Rococo Liberal
20 Sep 12 at 9:35 am
Obama acts in a way that proves the stings from the right are hitting hard.
How much proof do you need that the Sun King is feeling pressure from alternate news source provided by the blogosphere?
Token
20 Sep 12 at 10:14 am
Influence of the media – some stats for you:
People are not as stupid as the pundits think they are.
Token
20 Sep 12 at 10:17 am
A more accurate question would be whether the right is in process of discrediting itself. When the GOP presidential candidate is caught privately writing off at least 47% of the voting public, and the right cheers him on and tells him to double down by owning the comments in the face of everyone else reviling in horror, and he does… that speaks to some serious problems with electability of the right’s preferred platform.
The right doesn’t talk any more about a grand coalition. It needs to find a broader demographic beyond old white folks.
m0nty
20 Sep 12 at 10:18 am
For people who vote based upon emotion like you M0nty, you care. Event MSNBC could not sustain the line you are trying to peddle.
Token
20 Sep 12 at 10:36 am
Great post, Toke, which reminds me there is another factor in play that barely existed 10-20 years ago: an entire industry of bullshit artists (aka “communications consultants”) dedicated to ensuring that journalists a) are never allowed proximity to newsmakers, except under circumstances where the bullshit artists can control every word, including the questions asked; b) are given, in some circumstances, propaganda, in article form, which is attractive to news organisations with increasingly stretched editorial resources (see yesterday’s open thread post twostix 19 Sep 12 at 11:49 am); c) are increasingly isolated from independent sources to corroborate facts. One of the new SOP devices, begun in the past 1-2 years in Oz, which annoys the shit out of me, is “sorry, so and so isn’t available, but email your questions and I’ll get a reply”. This is designed to ban the utterance of every spontaneous word by The Talent and is the enemy of real information. This is the shit that journalists trying to penetrate the political industry are faced with: a wall of bullshit whose sole aim is to prevent you getting information and “controlling the message”. It now SOP in most industries. In the case of the image-conscious airline industry, for example, no stories are ever broken anymore without being put through the bullshit filter.
Tom
20 Sep 12 at 10:42 am
The liberal media think they are — the fatal vanity of the we-know-what’s-best-for-you collectivist elite — which is why it is destroying itself.
Tom
20 Sep 12 at 10:49 am
Interesting phenomenon. For some conservatives, the msm has already ceased to exist as a primary source of information and is really only resorted to when a more trusted intermediary (e.g. Drudge) refers to a particular item in a particular msm publication. In other words, they have elected to have the msm content filtered for them. Not only does this blunt the ability of the msm to disseminate its agenda, it also enables the new media to use the old media against itself and promote an entirely new agenda – conservative or libertarian according to taste and inclination.
larrikin
20 Sep 12 at 10:53 am
[...] Steve Kates at Cattalaxxy suggests “the media as arbiter may be disappearing before our eyes”. I suppose it is the nature of commentary, and now there is more dispersed commentary . . . with Romney’s 47% moment that was unanimously described across the media as the end of the Romney campaign, there has been an uprising on the right side of politics to argue that we here do not accept the media’s verdict and that the only problem with what Romney said was that he doesn’t say it often enough. [...]
SHAPING THE CAMPAIGN « DUCKPOND
21 Sep 12 at 3:13 am