Howard Fineman Plays “TAPS” for the Media Party.

On MSNBC Howard Fineman opines on the end of what he refers to as the Media Party.

He begins:

WASHINGTON - A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.

Now, I hate to quibble with a member of the MSM as he is helping expose the whitened sepulcher that is the AMMP, but the article makes reference to several myths that has become accepted wisdom thanks to the power of the MSM.

Did the MSM “validate” the civil rights movement? Admirers of Martin Luther King will probably not accept the unseemly super-ordination of the press over the participants.

Was Nixon “power-crazed?” That depends if you buy into the media-created myth that Nixon was shredding the Constitution in the basement of the White House. Between the description of Watergate as a “third rate burglary” and an attempt at a “self-coup,” objective observers (that excludes everyone in the MSM) will conclude that the reality is closer to the former than the latter.

Fineman goes on to mention another crusade: opposition to the war in Viet Nam. The MSM were successful. Yet once the last helicopter leaves the American Embassy in Saigon, there is a curious silence … blankness about the consequences of that crusade.

No mention of the killing fields of Cambodia, Viet Nam’s re-education camps or the boat people. In other words, the horrific cost in lives, in torture, in terror and rape; with victims numbering in the millions. The MSM are still, after more than 30 years, congratulating themselves on “getting the US out of its immoral involvement in an immoral war” without a word of acknowledgement of the consequences of their crusade. Does “Uncle Walter” Cronkite ever wake up at night, acknowledge his responsibility for mass murder? That much self-awareness the MSM lacks.

On January 12th Glenn Reynolds comments further on the myth of the non-partisan press:

The reality of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press would be worth holding onto -- if it had ever existed. But it didn't. What Fineman identifies as a golden age of neutrality was really a sham, and an artifact of two short-lived phenomena: First, Democratic/liberal political dominance so widespread at the time, at least among politicians and the press, that there weren't a lot of things to fight about; and, second, the inability of people who noticed bias and dishonesty to get the word out.

Neither situation obtains today. And rather than talk about the demise of neutrality and objectivity in news reporting, it might be better to note that CBS's problems, and the problems with Big Media in general, stem from an obvious and heavy-handed lack of neutrality and objectivity, coupled with a dishonest -- and increasingly lame and obvious -- effort to pretend otherwise.

RatherGate doesn't mean the end of neutral and objective reporting. It means that even the shammers can see that the sham isn't working any more. Will Big Media take that lesson to heart? I doubt it.