Benevolent Misanthropy

There is no problem that can confront a leftist, no matter how large, thorny, or difficult, that he will not first attempt to solve by playing with words and avoiding the problem altogether.

We can see a prime example of this process in a recent post by one Mr. Steve Lovelady, taking a break from his role as Collier and Green’s punching bag, at the CJR Campaign Desk:

Mainstream News Media, a.k.a. MSM: Usually used by blogosphere zealots on the right and the left as a disparaging reference to a handful of large and supposedly influential newspapers, magazines and TV networks. (And, oddly, enough, a term adopted by those it is meant to describe — who are fooling themselves, as we shall shortly show.)

Even before he gets down to the task of Orwellian redefinition, at which so many of his ilk take such apparent delight, he begins stacking the deck. MSM refers to “a handful” of “supposedly influential” outlets.

In case Mr. Lovelady missed it, the “handful”-ness of the MSM is one of the right’s objections to the situation — that is to say, there’s only a few of them, and they all say the same thing, and dismiss with contempt those who disagree with their outlook, no matter the facts. It’s not that they’re surrounded and outgunned, it’s that there is an ideological lock-step going on, and no alternatives of even remotely equivalent influence.

As to the “supposed” influence of these outlets, we have yet to hear of local newspapers or TV stations setting their news agendas by what runs in the Washington Times or the New York Sun, let alone reason or National Review. Unless Mr. Lovelady cares to document such a process, or present sufficient evidence to deflate the accumulated decades’-worth mountains of evidence to the contrary, we suggest that he drop his “supposedly” for the sophistry it is.

Continuing:

But in an age when overall newspaper circulation has been inexorably leaking away year after year for more than 20 years now; when the major network news operations draw barely 50 percent of the nightly audience they once had; and when general interest magazines have been elbowed aside by niche publications, the tag “mainstream” to describe a bunch of bewildered guys ‘n dolls who find themselves slipping daily down the razor blade of life seems not just quaint, but missing the point entirely.

We prefer the more accurate term Corporate Media, or CM, since paradoxically many of these floundering outfits are owned by monster corporations whose senior executives must wonder, as they stare at the ceiling at 3 o’clock in the morning, “What was I thinking?” (See Consolidation, Media.)

Mr. Lovelady suggests that, since the major organs of the MSM now control a plurality of the information dissemination apparatus instead of the supermajority they wielded in the past, the term “mainstream” is somehow now ridiculous.

Poppycock. While many individuals, disgusted with the bias and sloppiness endemic to the MSM, have sought their news out elsewhere, the majority of the public still receive their news through channels that route back to the major news organs that Lovelady now tries to present as oafish, bumbling, and naive.

He also manages a non sequitur sneer at capitalism, but since he’s a leftist that just means he still has a pulse. Calling the non sequitur “more accurate” would, we admit, be somewhat befuddling, but since we attended university, we realize that the average leftist just uses terms of logic as window dressing to appear more impressive.

And now, having made his feeble effort to redefine a dinosaur as a dodo, Lovelady lunges for his kill:

So is the very term MSM — meant to describe dinosaurs — a dinosaur itself?

Not at all. In a nation in which political and cultural conservatives occupy the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and most statehouses, MSM strikes us as a dead-on description of a more recent phenomenon: The avidly partisan right-wing press, represented in the swelling blogosphere, the small-magazine world, radio networks such as Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel, newspapers such as the Washington Times and the New York Post and, perhaps most importantly, any number of cable television outlets.

So “Mainstream Media” cannot possibly be used to refer to the media’s main stream of information dissemination, but it can refer to the (comparatively tiny) media outlets which, shunned by the big players in their own venue, happen to reflect a more honest admission of bias and, oh by the way, a point of view that Lovelady would just love to smear by proxy through his redefinition.

Mr. Lovelady, we wanted to have a few words with you about your new glossary. And those words are: nice try.

Mainstream Media, clearly and self-evidently, refers to the media’s main stream of both information and influence. As much of a beating as it has taken in recent years, The New York Times remains the most powerful paper in the nation, and thus is atop the heap of the MSM, along with the broadcast network news services, Time, and the others you try to rebrand.

Unless and until you can demonstrate that these news organs have been dethroned and replaced by that terrifying oligarchy, the conservative right, your feeble attempts to grab the moral high ground with word games are purest flummery.

(And please note that “dethroned and replaced” is not equivalent to “threatened by the first real competition they’ve faced in fifty years”. When the New York Times has the circulation numbers of the Washington Times (and vice versa), when Fox News has the rating numbers of the broadcast networks, and they’re down to CNN level numbers themselves, then you may begin to refer to your hated enemies as the mainstream media. To do so now is mendacity, nothing more.)