For the past 15 years, every issue of COMMENTARY has had a monthly feature devoted to the media—first, by Andrew Ferguson, then by Matthew Continetti, and since 2020, by Christine Rosen. With this issue, Christine will be taking on a new monthly challenge in the form of a column we’re calling “Social Commentary”—an effort to describe the way we live now and why we are so sorely in need of recapturing first principles and older and wiser prescriptions for how to live. And we are retiring our media column.
Why would we do this? Surely, you think, the news media are as much in need of analysis, explication, and criticism as they have been these past 15 years—indeed, over the past half-century, dating back to the mid-1970s, when the first important works about the effects of biased and misleading media coverage were produced.
The most important early work was Peter Braestrup’s magisterial Big Story, published in 1977. It was an exhaustive account of how the mainstream media in 1968 took an American victory in the battle of Tet and turned it into a defeat—leading to Lyndon Johnson’s startling decision to exit the presidential race that year because he had “lost” Walter Cronkite, who mischaracterized Tet in front of 40 million people.
Imagine the moment in time in which the president of the United States—winner of the biggest landslide in American history just three years earlier—believed he simply could not survive the criticism of a TV news anchorman on a single night 10 months before the election, and you get a sense not only of the power of the media but the absolute necessity of investigating the behavior of the media and questioning its assumptions and assertions.
Thus was modern media criticism born, and it was vitally important because it was a way of showing people how the press they relied upon was often wrong, parochial, deluded, or was actively gaslighting them.
The conservative media we know today did not exist when Braestrup published his landmark book. It rose in the 1980s and after as a corrective to mainstream media. People knew they were being fed a pack of lies but didn’t really know how or why—and found themselves turning to an AM talker named Rush Limbaugh to be told they were not crazy and that the way the world works was not the way it was being depicted on the nightly news or in newspapers.
At the same time, the monopoly over the flow of news information came to an end both technologically and financially. The three networks were supplanted by the rise of cable. The cash-cow newspapers, reliant for their profits on classified advertising, were destroyed by Craigslist and everything that followed from it. For nearly a quarter century now, the most popular televised news source has been the Fox News Channel.
In some sense, all conservative polemic, then and now, is a subset of media criticism. The arguments taken up in this magazine and elsewhere often center on the ways in which conservative ideas are mischaracterized and the way liberal ideas are unthinkingly accepted long after it’s been demonstrated they are bad or foolish or have unforeseen consequences. But media criticism in the old style has an anachronistic quality. The institutions that dominated news gathering and the expression of opinion are going the way of the dodo.
In a decade, almost none of the giant machines that controlled news flow in the United States will be standing. In the end, writing about them as though they retain the power they once had is like covering Michael Jackson as though he were still the biggest star in the world instead of a long-dead trailblazer known not only for his music but for his pedophilia.
Photo: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
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