The MSM's High Water Mark

[Adam's Apple]

Big Media's High-Water Mark
By James P. Pinkerton for Newsday
June 2, 2005

The Deep Throat story revives memories of the liberals' heyday in covering the news - before cable and blogs

For the major media, Watergate was the "good war," in which purely heroic reporters brought down the thoroughly villainous Richard Nixon.

So the belated revelation that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat is being cheered by the press establishment - even if those cheers sound a bit like last gasps.

Not surprisingly, The Washington Post ran seven self back-patting articles yesterday, including two on the front page. But others in the Old Media joined in, too: Felt-is-"Throat" led all three nightly broadcast news shows and filled up countless other news holes.

For the mostly liberal MSM - mainstream media - the Felt story is a chance to walk down happy-memory lane, to the halcyon days of the 1970s, before talk radio, cable news and the blogosphere. Yes, Nixon was president, but liberalism was nevertheless entrenched in the media and in Congress.

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-oppin024286407jun02,0,5799422.column

 

[musicman]

"...I took these words to heart (Watergate being 'the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered, [worse than] the Civil War')...mostly because there was no voice in the media to simply laugh out loud in derisive response".

No, there wasn't (small wonder the media shaped as well as reported history). But there is now, and the MSM/DNC really, really hate it. Their little game is up.

I believe this Deep Throat tidbit has been on ice for awhile now - waiting for the most opportune (that is to say, harmful to conservatives) moment. That it had to be sprung now - light years away, in the context of the information age, from any election cycle - is the measure of the MSM/DNC's desperation. In the face of television ratings in free-fall and circulation numbers that read like death notices, they still can't stop committing slow mass-suicide. They continue trying to play the Watergate hand without their trump card - a monopoly on the dissemination of information - and all they wind up with is Rathergate, Easongate, Foleygate, and the Newsweek Bloodbath. They are, as Allen Funt of Candid Camera would have called them, "people caught in the act of being themselves".

Keep up the good work, guys!