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Sunday, May 18, 2008

WSJ Washington Editor: Network Newscasts 'Don't Matter Anymore'

The MSM is figuring out what to do now that the world no longer revolves around them.

According Gerald Seib, an assistant managing editor and the executive Washington editor of The Wall Street Journal, ABC’s “World News,” the “CBS Evening News” and the “NBC Nightly News” just aren’t important in the grand scheme of Washington politics, and that’s part of the changing culture of the news media.
...
“And he [Abrams] talks about how in the Reagan White House where he worked, the whole place shut down between 6:30 and 7:30. All activity stopped because everybody wanted to see what was being broadcast on the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news broadcasts. They were that important to the agenda in Washington. Much of the previous day had been constructed to influence what would be on those three newscasts. He said, ‘Now I work in the White House, I haven’t watched in months. They just don’t matter anymore. That’s not where people get their news.’”

Here is the money quote:
People are watching news on cable television. They’re reading it online all day long. It’s splintered, it’s fractured. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I can make an argument either way. It’s a more democratized flow of news, but there’s less sort of central understanding and a lot of people are getting their news the way they want it to be rather than the way it is and that’s a bad thing.


Interpretation: democracy is good except in the dissemination of information. That "central understanding" was the Liberalism view of reality. He confuses lack of diversity with the truth.

Getting the news you are looking for is a bad thing? Well, it could be if you get told a lot of lies, like Walter Cronkite proclaiming "and that's the way it is." Strikingly reminiscent of Pravda, which happens to be the Russian word for "truth."

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