Saving Kathy Tomlinson

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal.

Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did so by choosing to go into overt opposition to one party’s candidate, a sitting president. It stooped to conquer.
The prominent case studies here are Dan Rather’s failed National Guard story on CBS and the front page the past year of the New York Times (a proxy for many large dailies). Add in as well Big Media’s handling of Abu Ghraib, a real story that got blown into a monthlong bonfire that obviously was intended to burn down the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. I think many people thought the over-the-top Abu Ghraib coverage, amid a war, was the media shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Heavily consolidated Canadian media outlets are just as professionally corrupt. With no Wall Street Journal or Foxnews to provide an balancing establishment lens against which to compare and critique, the left-liberal spin is not only rampant, it’s unbelievably clumsy. Case in point, last evening’s CTV National News included a segment by Kathy Tomlinson who seems to spend much of her time in Washington covering the Democratic Underground.
Heavily paraphrased, her report evolved in the following manner;

“Voters in the US recently indicated “moral values” were behind the re-election of President Bush, and now there is a climate of fear that airing the Spielberg movie Saving Private Ryan (which has bad words and violence that Spielberg won’t allow cut) could result in FCC fines (like they did for Janet Jackson’s tit) because Bush is sending soldiers to Iraq where there is real fighting and killing and he doesn’t want Americans to see what that looks like”

I kid you not.
Henninger has cautionary words for the likes of Ms. Tomlinson.

Authority can be a function of raw power, but among free people it is sustained by esteem and trust. Should esteem and trust falter, the public will start to contest an institution’s authority. It happens all the time to political figures. It happened here to the American Catholic Church and to the legal profession, thanks to plaintiff-bar abuse. And now the public is beginning to contest the decades-old authority of the mainstream media.
Two months ago, Gallup reported that public belief in the media’s ability to report news accurately and fairly had fallen to 44%–what Gallup called a significant drop from 54% just a year ago. The larger media outlets have been pushing the edge of the partisanship envelope for a long time. People have kvetched about “spin” for years but then largely internalized it. Not in 2004. Big Media chose precisely the wrong moment to give itself over to an apparent compulsion to overthrow the Bush presidency.

Left wing CBC TV has long suffered for their sins. Were it not for a billion dollars in federal funding, a 6% audience share would have closed the doors years ago. The scandal damaged BBC has announced dramatic staff cuts. Circulation figures for many major newspapers are falling. In contrast, more and more consumers state they are obtaining their news and opinion from internet sources.
Liberal friendly Candian media has had the luxury of a huge ideological cushion provided by the Liberal appointed CRTC – but as the influence of online news and opinion sources continues to grow, the blocking of sources like Foxnews will no longer protect them.
I sent an email last night to complain about the segment, something I rarely do anymore. For 20 years I was a nightly viewer of CTV National News. Today, I’d estimate I catch the broadcast only once every week or two. They’ve become “CBC light”, and with so many other games in town, I can’t be bothered.