CNN HAS ALWAYS HATED THE COMPETITION: Watch: Showdown at CNN As Sneering Campaign to Diminish New Media Voices Crashes and Burns.
JENNINGS: “What the right wing is taking advantage of is finally the American people saying enough is enough. They’re tired of feeling like the mass media screens out one viewpoint versus another in political coverage. They’re tired of media institutions favoring one party over another. They’re tired of narratives over factual stories. If I had any advice for 60 Minutes or anybody else, it would be: just cover the news and try to be fair about it and stop putting your finger on the scale, especially during campaigns.”
[…]
PHILLIP: “Let’s be honest, Scott, a lot of this is driven by the rhetoric on your side of aisle.”
JENNINGS: “You think it’s driven by the rhetoric and not the performance?”
PHILLIP: “Absolutely.”
JENNINGS: “If you’re CBS or any other news outlet, the reason that you have lost trust ought to be obvious to you, and the way to fix it also ought to be obvious to you, and it has nothing to do with Donald Trump and everything to do with the product. Just try to make a better product that appeals to more people. And the way you appeal to more people is by not crapping on half or more than half of the country because of their values and political viewpoints!”
JEFF JARVIS: “What you’d end up with in that press room, is, and these are my words, the freak show that Trump wants. Trump tries to devalue media. Why should we value his freak show there? Let’s leave it to the freaks!”
JENNINGS: “Calling them freaks is something. He called these new media sources the freak show. They’re not freaks. They have audiences. They have audiences, and there’s a reason that they’re thriving – is because people are starved for information that they think they can trust. They’re not freaks. They’re filling a need in this country.”
Twenty years ago, Jarvis actually knew this. Found scrolling the Instapundit archives: Pot calls kettle hot.
Because a blogger does something you say is wrong, [then-NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin], all bloggers are now amoral? By that logic, then, when someone at NPR says something liberal, then all of NPR is liberal. (Hmmm.) And if a reporter lies then all reporters lie?
NPR screwed up but when that’s discovered it’s the bloggers who are amoral?
Few rules? Actually, there are many rules — but they’re not necessarily your rules, they are the rules of the public you serve. They sometimes have different rules and often, sir, you and your network and our profession fail their rules. Who made Dan Rather honest? Journalists or bloggers?
You dismiss bloggers and their rules and thus your audience and the public in one broad slap. You separate yourself from the public you want to serve.
And you do so with attitude: “Once again,” you say without links or citations, “once again” blogs prove to be amoral. Give us your evidence, please.
Civic responsibility? I’d say that blogs are a living expression of civic responsibility — they are the citizens holding the powerful responsible. What could be a better expression?
And: Blogging white male.
In this medium of all media, we must get past throwing our fellow citizens into big, messy buckets: left, right, male, female, white, not…. The lesson of this medium is that we’re individuals and we don’t fit those broad and shallow definitions: Read us and you will hear more diversity from every voice than you have ever heard in any medium that ever came before.
And can we use more diversity? You bet we can. But that’s not a problem. That’s an opportunity.
“Diversity problem?” Kneejerk crock, that.
At the end of his column — after lumping all this in with the Estrich-Kinsley shrill media shriekfest — Levy challenges the blogosphere to find 50 new voices to link to. I’ll turn it around, Steven: Let’s see you and Newsweek find and quote and listen to and link to 50 new voices never heard before in mainstream media every week.
In the mid-2000s, when much of the rest of the DNC-MSM were dismissing those nascent bloggers as Cat Food Eating Pajama Wearing Extreme Bloggers In Boardroom Bathrooms, Jarvis was defending them. Now that they’re attending White House press briefings, and he’d like to keep his access to the CNN green room, they’re “freaks.” (I’m old enough to remember the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when liberals considered calling someone a “freak” to be something of a backhanded compliment.)
But then, attacking the competition is nothing new for CNN; Ted Turner was comparing Fox to National Socialists in 1996, even before it went on the air, only to be thrilled less than a decade later to visit firsthand a regime that takes its form of a highly nationalistic socialism quite seriously.
