2004 was not a good year for the mainstream media (newspapers, news magazines, and broadcast news - radio and TV) in the US. Throughout 2004 (and to a lesser degree for several years prior) the mainstream media dropped its pretense of objectivity and used their broadcasts, publications, and credibility to try to bring about the election defeat of President George W. Bush. Much to their chagrin, it didn’t work, and in the process even more Americans had their eyes opened to the mainstream media’s bias. Even worse for the mainstream media, one network, CBS, featured phony documents and concealed pertinent contradictory information from viewers in an attack on President Bush that boomeranged on CBS. CBS made matters worse for themselves by defending the forgeries for a couple of weeks as genuine while stridently attacking its critics as biased. Events ultimately vindicated the critics. Since then, the country has witnessed the spectacle of CBS’s supposed competitors circling the wagons in defense of CBS, and has been treated to an internal CBS "investigation" that found some scape goats, but never seriously faced the obvious bias that was the underlying motive for CBS broadcasting and defending a phony story based on crude forgeries. In the aftermath of these Siamese twin debacles, there are four fundamental lessons the mainstream media needs to learn, if they dare.

First, the bias genie is out of the bottle, and it was the mainstream media who let it out. For decades it has been clear, to those willing to admit it, that the mainstream media have been publishing and broadcasting with a strong liberal bias. This is not due to any conspiracy or collusion. The vast majority of mainstream media reporters, writers, and production people are liberal, and they are their own social circle. Thus, their reporting reflects the ideas, attitudes, and priorities that are axiomatic to themselves and most people they know. In 2004, the mainstream media were so desirous to see President Bush defeated in the election that all pretense of neutrality was dropped and what was reported was skewed to influence voters to reject Bush. Information that showed the economy had recovered from the 2001 recession was suppressed. Reporting of events in Iraq was one-sidedly negative. Abu Ghraib was misrepresented as an attempted cover-up, as being linked to White House policy and falsely equated with Saddam’s murderous brutality. More voters rejected this skew-news than bought it and many recognized the underlying bias. The mainstream media are fooling themselves if they think the bias genie can be stuffed back into the bottle, and that they can successfully resume their pretense of objectivity.

Next, the mainstream media is no longer alone. The tide has been slowly rising, but other information media have broken the mainstream media’s mindset-powered information monopoly. Major new media players include talk radio, Internet news sites, Internet discussion sites, and Internet bloggers. Some twenty years ago, a relative few editorial people in the mainstream media decided what was published and broadcast - i.e. what ordinary people would read, hear, and see - as "news" and, conversely, what would not be heard or seen. Today, the new media have so grown in scope and audience that they are able effectively to bypass the mainstream media when important stories or parts of stories have been spiked by the mainstream media.

This introduces the third lesson for the mainstream media - they are no longer in control. They cannot control what information is available to ordinary people. Players in the new media will cover and disseminate important stories when the mainstream media won’t. The new media is also able to provide information and perspectives that counter the bias and spin the mainstream media inject into one-sided stories.

The fourth lesson goes a step further. The mainstream media is going to be held accountable. Until a few years ago, mainstream media outlets were largely only accountable to themselves. While organizations such as Accuracy in Media (http://www.aim.org/) have been around for over 20 years, the mainstream media, until recently, have been able to minimize their impact by ignoring and/or denigrating those organizations. With the advent of the new media, many of whom do not share the mindset of mainstream media people, and the consequent loss of the ability to dodge accountability, both media watchdog organizations and individuals who notice bias and factual errors are able to make their voices heard. As the CBS Memo-Gate debacle demonstrated, there is a critical mass of new media voices who are able to overcome the mainstream media’s desire to squelch rather than acknowledge valid criticism. This kind of monitoring and criticism is likely to grow until the mainstream media faces and deals with their biases and hunger to shape rather than report events. The mainstream media have been steadily losing readers, listeners, and viewers. As the mainstream media’s bias gets increasingly exposed, that loss will become even greater (slowing when the audience mostly consists of people sharing that view of the world, if the losses are allowed to continue).

Will the mainstream media pay attention to these lessons? I’m not certain. Many, probably most, in the mainstream media are in denial about their bias. They regard their view of the world as simply common sense, normalcy. On the other hand, the mainstream media has been steadily hemorrhaging readers, listeners, and viewers. At some point, advertisers are going to pull the financial plugs that are the mainstream media’s life support. Will the loss of audience cause the mainstream media to drop their denial before advertisers’ defections become critical? Time will tell.

7-24-05 Addendum: What Time Is Telling - More Mainstream Media Follies

Three "new" mainstream media oopses have been playing out since I wrote the article above (1-05): the flap over the "Downing Street Memo"; the bogus claims of torture and desecration of the Qur’an in the Guantanamo detention camp; the false accusation that Presidential advisor Karl Rove illegally "outed" an undercover CIA agent in an effort to discredit her husband, a critic of President Bush’s policies. Sadly, these illustrate the fact that the mainstream media is as dedicated to pursuing and publishing their bias as ever.

Around the beginning of 2005, the "Downing Street Memo" started gaining currency among many Democrat leaders as "proof" that the War in Iraq was a Bush conspiracy, and that intelligence about WMDs was a fiction concocted to gin up support for the war The mainstream media have followed the Democrats’ lead. The full text of the memo can be found here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html . The quote that supposedly "proves" the conspiracy theory is:

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

President Bush’s critics, including the mainstream media, have fixated about the phrase, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy". The word "fixed" is interpreted as if the British memo writer used American slang, as in a "fixed" horse race. What the critics probably don’t wish to see is that the writer’s clear meaning is that existing intelligence was being collated together - fixed around - to justify the decision.

The mainstream media have also chosen to ignore sentences in the memo that disprove the whole the-Iraq-War-was-a-Bush-conspiracy-and-intelligence-was-fictionalized conspiracy theory. Near the beginning of the quote above is these two sentences: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable." War being inevitable is identified as a new attitude, not as something long pre-determined. Later in the memo, this statement is found:

"On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

"For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary."

If WMDs were a fiction in the process of being concocted, why did Defense Secretary Rumsfeld worry about their being used on US troops, Kuwait, or Israel?

In short, the text of the Downing Street Memo, taken at face value, contradicts what Bush’s critics claims it proves. How many Americans saw through the memo is uncertain, but the conspiracy claims didn’t "play in Peoria". The mainstream media have expended a lot of ink and much broadcast time concerning this memo, hoping to undermine President Bush, but the only ones hurt so far have been the critics and the mainstream media. Less well known is that there is real possibility that this memo may not be real. The London Times reporter who "revealed" the "Downing Street Memo" - during an election campaign - claims that he re-typed the memo and destroyed the original, supposedly to protect his source. In so doing, he precluded efforts to verify that the memo existed, wasn’t a forgery, or that the reporter didn’t indulge in creative editing in an effort to damage Prime Minister Tony Blair’s reelection effort.

A month or two ago, the mainstream media and Democrat politicians were trumpeting claims that US soldiers and, ultimately, President Bush’s administration were responsible for torture and desecration of the Qur’an at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. Their hysteria became so great that Democrat Senator Dick Durbin, speaking from the floor of the US Senate, claimed the acts were of Hitlerian or Gulag-like proportion. That Mr. Durbin’s claim is hideously ludicrous is easily demonstrated by pointing out that millions of people died in Hitler’s concentration camps and Stalin’s Gulags, but none in Guantanamo. After investigation, it has also been shown that no torture has taken place. Interrogators have made prisoners uncomfortable or embarrassed prisoners while interrogating them, but no torture took place. As for the claim - published by Newsweek magazine - that a copy of the Qur’an was desecrated by being flushed down a toilet, that also has been shown to be false.

More recently, an imaginary scandal has focused on Karl Rove. As the mainstream media’s myth is told, Karl Rove, a principal advisor to President Bush, retaliated against ambassador Joe Wilson for Wilson’s criticism of President Bush by calling reporters to "out" Wilson’s wife, an undercover CIA agent, a violation of US law. Democrat politicians and the mainstream media have published and broadcast a firestorm of demands for Mr. Rove’s resignation and prosecution. To the discomfiture of the mainstream media, the following facts have come out: Valerie Plame was not, when her identity as a CIA agent was revealed, an undercover CIA agent, and hadn’t been for six or more years; that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA was known to her neighbors, and she openly drove to work at CIA headquarters every day; it was a media person who informed Mr. Rove that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA; the media reporter initiated contact with Karl Rove (not the reverse), and the initial topic was welfare reform; the reporter who brought up the topic of Joe Wilson; Karl Rove didn’t even mention Valerie Plame’s name. In short, no law was broken, there was no act of retaliation against Joe Wilson or Valerie Plame, and Karl Rove’s only "offense" is being President Bush’s advisor.

Not only have the mainstream media not learned from the fallout of last year’s bias festival, but they are multiplying more of the same. The mainstream media’s obtuseness is also multiplying the reach and credibility of the new media of talk radio and Internet news and discussion sites. The mainstream media can no longer publish and broadcast false information or half-truths without the risk of exposure, as they no longer have a monopoly on information dissemination.