Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Il collasso dei Grandi Media: L'Inizio.

The Collapse of Big Media: Starting Over
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=120801
  The Collapse of Big Media: Starting Over
by Terry Eastland
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The Collapse of Big Media: The Young and the Restless by David T. Z. Mindich
The Collapse of Big Media: Seven Steps to Salvation by William Powers
It’s premature to write an obituary, but there’s no question that 
America’s news media—the newspapers, newsmagazines, and television 
networks that people once turned to for all their news—are experiencing 
what psychologists might call a major life passage. They’ve seen their 
audiences shrink, they’ve had to worry about vigorous new competitors, 
and they’ve suffered more than a few self-inflicted wounds—scandals of 
their own making. They know that more and more people have lost 
confidence in what they do. To many Americans, today’s newspaper is 
irrelevant, and network news is as compelling as whatever is being 
offered over on the Home Shopping Network. Maybe less.
The First Amendment protects against government abridgment of the 
freedom of the press. But it doesn’t guarantee that today’s news 
media—some would already say yesterday’s—will be tomorrow’s. Though most 
existing news organizations will probably survive, few if any are likely 
to enjoy the prestige and clout they once did. So it’s time to write, if 
not an obituary, then an account of their rise and decline and delicate 
prospects amid the “new media” of cable television, talk radio, and the 
blogosphere.
The “new media” carry the adjective because they began to emerge only in 
the 1980s, when the media of newspapers, newsmagazines, and network and 
local television news had long been firmly in place. Most newspapers had 
been around since the first decades of the 20th century, and though 
rising costs and competition caused some to be shuttered in the decades 
after World War II, there were still more than 1,700 papers published 
daily in the 1970s. Time and Newsweek were established, respectively, in 
1923 and 1933. Network television newscasts were reaching most parts of 
the country by the 1950s, and local stations eventually provided their 
own news programs at various points in the day.
The most important old news organizations were the outlets that covered 
stories in the nation’s capital and abroad. They included The New York 
Times  and The Washington Post; Time and Newsweek; NBC News, CBS News, 
and ABC News; National Public Radio and public television’s various 
iterations of what is now called The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. When 
people talked about the “mainstream” or “establishment” media, these 
were the organizations they had in mind. They were leaders among the 
media generally, and shaped how regional and local outlets practiced 
journalism.
They were also part of America’s first sizable national elite, which 
emerged after World War II in response to the needs of a nation whose 
central government was larger and more invasive, costly, and ambitious 
than ever  before. Political leaders, lawyers, academics, 
businesspeople, and certain practitioners of that once-disreputable 
trade, journalism, populated this elite. As in the other elites, members 
of the media elite held degrees from many of the same (elite) 
universities. They believed that they had a responsibility to improve 
society, and they thought of themselves—as no ink-stained wretch had 
before—as professionals.
The most influential journalists understood that news is rarely news in 
the sense of being undisputed facts about people or policy, but news in 
the sense that it’s a product made by reporters, editors, and producers. 
They knew that news is about facts, but that it fundamentally reflects 
editorial judgments about whether particular facts are “news,” and if 
they are, what the news means and what its consequences may be. They 
knew, too, that those who define and present the news have a certain 
power, since news can set a public agenda. And they weren’t shy about 
exercising this power. That’s what made them dominant—an establishment, 
in fact.
At their best, the elite media pursued stories of public importance and 
reported them thoroughly, accurately, and in reasonably fair and 
balanced fashion. And they did that a great deal of the time. They were 
never the relentlessly vigilant “watchdogs” they congratulated 
themselves on being, but they did sometimes do valuable work policing 
the abuses and failures of government and other institutions.
And they influenced the nation, most dramatically during the 1960s and 
1970s. They probably tipped the close 1960 election between Richard 
Nixon and John Kennedy, when, as Theodore H. White reported in The 
Making of the President, 1960 (1961), the coverage clearly favored 
Kennedy. They early and correctly judged that the civil rights movement 
was news, and they turned news with datelines in the South into a 
national story of profound significance. They also affected the 1968 
election—through what historian Paul Johnson called their “tendentious 
presentation” of news about the Vietnam War, which came to a head with 
the Tet offensive in January 1968, a major American military victory 
that the media cast as a defeat. Some described this portrayal as flawed 
reporting—notably the founding editor of this journal, Peter Braestrup, 
in Big Story (1977)—while others saw it as a product of bias. But the 
effect of the treatment of Tet was to help shift elite opinion 
decisively against the war. In March 1968, after nearly losing the New 
Hampshire primary, President Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for 
reelection.
And then there was the presidency of Richard Nixon. Nixon was never 
liked by the news media, to put it mildly, and he returned the favor, 
calling the press “the enemy.” When the judicial process exposed a 
“third-rate burglary” at the Watergate complex in Washington, The 
Washington Post pursued the story, with other outlets later joining in. 
Nixon became the only president in American history to resign the office.
The media establishment emerged at a time when Americans generally 
respected those in authority. But when, beginning in the 1960s, 
authority took a severe beating, the media establishment was the one 
authority that actually gained in strength. Crusading reporters and 
editors became cultural heroes—the rebels and nonconformists who refused 
to kowtow to anybody. The Watergate scandal in particular confirmed in 
the media the sense they had of themselves as independent guardians of 
the public good and the very conscience of the nation in times of 
crisis. Over the years, judicial decisions also went their way, securing 
greater protection for the exercise of media power. For the 
establishment media, life was very good.
Since the 1980s, however, more and more Americans have stopped relying 
on the traditional media for news. Some have quit the news habit 
entirely. Newspaper circulation has been declining, and network ratings 
are sharply down. Mainstream outlets no longer have a monopoly on the 
news, their journalism is subjected to sometimes withering scrutiny, and 
they are ignored when they are not criticized. Life is no longer so good.
There are many explanations for why Americans have been turning away 
from their old news providers, including adjustments in how people now 
live and work (fewer have time to watch the evening news) and the lack 
of interest in news evident among younger generations whose tastes often 
carry them to MTV. But the media can also blame themselves for the change.
Here it bears noting that though journalists aspired to the status of 
professionals, they never acquired the self-regulatory mechanisms found 
in law, medicine, or even business. The nation’s journalism schools, 
which taught—and still teach—a craft better learned on the job, never 
really filled the void. Those schools often tended to hire former 
journalists lacking both the intellectual capability and the inclination 
to undertake serious analysis of the institutions whence they came. 
Critical scholarship by those outside the guild tended to be summarily 
dismissed, and the field was always thin on professional journals 
examining its practices and guiding ideas. Most of those that were 
tried—for example, I edited Forbes Media Critic from 1993 through 
1996—found no footing. Media criticism, such as it was, leaned mostly to 
  polemics and insider chatter (news people are happy to talk endlessly 
about themselves, evidently on the assumption that others are eager to 
listen).
Of course, the media did have critics who didn’t publish 
articles—ordinary Americans. Too often they’d turn on the evening news 
and hear about conflict and controversy. It was as though news, if it 
were to be real, had to be boiled down to some negative essence, some 
clod of dirt that the subjects of a story flung at each other. Or they’d 
see an interview in which a correspondent would ask a nonquestion 
question designed to put the hapless interviewee in his or her place. 
Thus in 1995 did a CBS Good Morning host “ask” then-senator Phil Gramm 
of Texas, “If you really want to reduce the deficit, are you going to 
have to cut entitlements? But I’m sure you don’t want to talk about 
that.” Or the public would read news stories in which the writers took 
gratuitous shots at their subjects. Thus did Maureen Dowd, before her 
elevation from reporter to columnist at The New York Times, lead her 
front-page story on President Bill Clinton’s 1994 visit to Oxford with a 
sentence stating that he was making “a sentimental journey to the 
university where he didn’t inhale, didn’t get drafted, and didn’t get a 
degree.”
The negativity in the news may have resulted from the more personalized 
or interpretative journalism that began appearing in the 1960s. It 
represented a break from the old norm of objectivity by which reporters 
were obliged to keep their own views out of articles, and it was thought 
to help in uncovering the “real story” beyond any official statements 
and scheduled events. Perhaps the urgent need to compete for smaller 
pools of viewers and readers also played a role in the rise of negative 
news. But to judge by opinion polls, the public wasn’t impressed. The 
negativity, not to mention the arrogance with which it was often served 
up, caused many to tune out.
The public had another problem with media figures: their political and 
social views. Surveys taken over several decades demonstrated that most 
national journalists voted Democratic and were politically and socially 
liberal. In 1962, The Columbia Journalism Review published a survey of 
273 Washington journalists in which 57 percent called themselves liberal 
and 28 percent conservative, with the rest choosing “middle of the road” 
or declining any label. The conservative contingent was down to 17 
percent when sociologist S. Robert Lichter and Smith College political 
scientist Stanley Rothman conducted another survey in 1980. Most 
respondents said they were “lifestyle liberals,” meaning that they 
favored abortion rights and affirmative action and rejected the notion 
that homosexuality was wrong. Eighty-six percent said they seldom or 
never attended religious services. Eighty-one percent had voted for 
George McGovern in 1972. In 1992, another survey of 139 Washington-based 
bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents found that 89 percent 
planned to vote for the Democrat, Bill Clinton, in the approaching 
presidential election.
The surveys certainly said something about the media. But they did not 
say that the news the media provided was biased; that required its own 
demonstration. Members of the elite media often asserted that the public 
could count on their professionalism to ensure against bias. Yet they 
seldom admitted bias, even in stories in which it was all too obvious.
Nor would they concede that they might be missing news because they were 
disposed to look for it only in the kinds of places people of their 
mindset and values thought potentially newsworthy. The news they found 
in those places might indeed be legitimate news. But other sorts of 
news, to be found in places people of a different mindset and other 
values might think to explore, were often neglected. A case in point was 
the media’s failure, in the run-up to the historic 1994 congressional 
elections, to examine seriously the substance of the GOP’s campaign 
manifesto, the “Contract with America.” Only after the elections did the 
media take a much-belated look.
Whatever bias the media did not concede, and whatever places they 
skipped past where news might have been sought, there remained this 
essential fact: Most journalists were liberal in their political views 
and voting preferences. Today, no one really disputes that fact, nor 
have mainstream journalists changed much in this regard, for every new 
survey only confirms what all the previous ones reported. But when the 
mainstream media began their decline in the 1980s, they were reluctant 
to concede the point. In so many words, they often seemed to say, “If 
our liberalism is a fact—and we don’t really know that it is—it’s 
irrelevant.”
The media bravely (perilously?) held that position even as the country 
continued a rightward movement that has now culminated, for the first 
time in a half century, in Republican control of both ends of 
Pennsylvania Avenue. An increasingly conservative public was being asked 
to continue getting its news from people who, by and large, held liberal 
views. That was a tough sell, and it got even tougher because the new 
media made possible by emerging technologies offered alternatives.
The Cable News Network, founded in 1980, was arguably the first new 
media entity, its distinguishing characteristic that it offered news 
24/7. Other round-the-clock cable news providers followed, including, in 
1996, the Fox News Channel. Meanwhile, national talk radio captured 
large audiences, with none bigger than that for Rush Limbaugh, who 
debuted in 1988. In 1999, the first weblog appeared on the Internet. 
Today the number of blogs—they make up the “blog­osphere”—is growing 
every day.
The new media tended to be more hospitable to conservative views. And it 
was through the new media that a public growing more conservative in its 
politics began to find satisfaction. Which is not to say that the new 
media produced better news stories. They didn’t, and still don’t, 
because, cable news networks excepted, they don’t do much in the way of 
original reporting. They analyze and opine on the basis of news reported 
not only by cable television but by the traditional media, which they 
daily criticize.
Yet the new media also do something else. To the traditional media, the 
new media have always looked awfully incomplete, as being more about 
politics and ideology than about news. Still, from their inception the 
new media have been landing blows on the old media precisely where it 
matters most. Remember that news is a thing made, a product, and that 
media with certain beliefs and values once made the news and then 
presented it in authoritative terms, as though beyond criticism. Thus 
did Walter Cronkite famously end his newscasts, “And that’s the way it 
is.” That way, period.
But the question the new media have asked is precisely, “Which way was 
it?” And, in answering it, they have allowed people with beliefs and 
values different from those dominating the old media to have their say. 
Though cable and radio talk shows have been derided as shoutfests, 
they’ve enabled people to think differently about the news. Historian 
Christopher Lasch once observed that only in the course of argument do 
“we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn.” 
The new media’s chief accomplishment may well turn out to be that they 
opened for argument questions to which the old media alone used to 
provide answers.
A notable characteristic of the new media is speed (some would say 
haste). Their speed is another reason for the old media’s travail. 
Consider what happened when Dan Rather reported that infamous story on 
CBS News’s 60 Minutes Wednesday suggesting that George W. Bush had 
shirked his duties while serving as a pilot in the Texas Air National 
Guard. The story was broadcast on September 8, 2004, and by the 
following morning bloggers were tearing apart documents essential to the 
story, revealing them to be painfully obvious fakes. Traditional media 
soon began picking at the CBS story, but it’s not evident that, absent 
the blogosphere, the piece would have been deconstructed. Nor that a 
formal investigation by CBS itself would have ensued, which resulted in 
scathing criticism of the broadcast, the firing of the story’s producer, 
the resignation of three other executives, and the 
earlier-than-anticipated retirement of Rather himself as anchor of the 
evening news.
The deeper point about the quick breakdown of the Bush National Guard 
story was that it revealed a media establishment without its old power 
and influence. CBS News and other establishment outlets wanted to 
determine what the news should be in the obviously important context of 
a presidential campaign. They had grown anxious about campaign coverage 
that seemed to them too influenced by “outsiders” and the new media. In 
early August, a group of Vietnam veterans opposed to John Kerry began 
running an ad that challenged his account of his Vietnam service. The 
establishment media ignored their claims, but the blogosphere didn’t. 
Nor did cable and radio talk shows, on which the Swift Boat Veterans, as 
they were called, made frequent appearances. Once Kerry formally 
responded to the Swifties, the big networks and newspapers had little 
choice but to cover the story, despite their dislike for it.
Some establishment journalists argued that the media now had an 
obligation to turn the spotlight on Bush. Syndicated columnist E. J. 
Dionne, Jr., a former reporter for both The New York Times and The 
Washington Post, wrote, “Now that John Kerry’s life during his twenties 
has been put at the heart of this campaign just over two months from 
Election Day, the media owe the country a comparable review of what Bush 
was doing at the same time and the same age. If all the stories about 
what Kerry did in Vietnam are not balanced by serious scrutiny of Bush 
in the Vietnam years, the media will be capitulating to a right-wing 
smear campaign. Surely our nation’s editors and producers don’t want to 
send a signal that all you have to do to set the media’s agenda is to 
spend a half-million bucks on television ads.”
Not just CBS News but several other establishment outlets were trying to 
reset that agenda by pursuing the National Guard story, a quest that 
would carry them to the door of the same man who passed the bogus 
documents to CBS and was described by the panel that investigated the 
fiasco as a “partisan with an anti-Bush agenda.” CBS acted first, with 
fateful results, but none of the other media ever produced any authentic 
documents either. The story simply wasn’t there.
In 1995, Jonathan Alter wrote a Newsweek column recognizing that the 
“old media order” was “in decline.” The decline has only continued. Even 
so, it’s hard to imagine an America without the news organizations that 
make up the old media, if only because they’re still the main sources of 
independent reporting, and such reporting is essential in a country 
whose self-governing people need information to make all kinds of 
decisions. Yet for the old media to become newly credible, to regain 
respect and audience, in a country more populous and less enamored of 
elites than it once was, and more red than blue, they’re going to have 
to dial down their imperial arrogance. They’re going to have to learn 
from the best of what the new media offer, and perhaps even recruit 
bloggers to help with news judgment and fact-checking. And they’re 
definitely going to have to look for news in places they formerly did not.
Occasionally you see evidence that an old media outlet is beginning to 
get it. Beginning, I say. Consider The New York Times, like CBS News a 
charter member of the establishment media, and, like CBS News, an 
institution burdened by a recent scandal (Jayson Blair’s plagiarism and 
fabrications) which eventually cost top journalists their jobs. In 
January 2004 the Times effectively conceded the need to enlarge the 
field in which it looks for news when it deployed a reporter to cover, 
as the Times’ press release put it, “conservative forces in religion, 
politics, law, business, and the media.” It was as if the Times had 
decided that it should now cover some far-off, exotic country that had 
suddenly become a world power—and yet it was dispatching only a single 
correspondent to do the job! But at least that was a start. Finally, 
there was change. So the Times was right to put out a press release: 
This really was news. o

guarda che ci sono molti più blog di ultrasinistra che ultraconservatori
(non è un mistero che il popolo della rete sia molto più progressista della
media). Non parliamo poi dei blog islamisti

 Non parliamo poi dei blog islamisti
Che sono, immagino, ancor più progressisti della media dei progressisti.
Tb
-- 
TBLOG
http://www.tonibaruch.blogspot.com/
I CULOTASTIERATI:
http://tonibaruch.buzznet.com/user/?id=921717
FATE IL VOSTRO SOMARO
http://snipurl.com/f0l3

 
IMHO, e' una questione di aver cose da dire: tu non sei stato uno dei primi?
Bwaha!
Am.


Non è questo che importa.
E che prima, la fetta maggioritaria della popolazione, che non è 
"Progressista", "di sinistra", "liberals", etc. non aveva modo di 
diffondere le notizie che le interessavano.
Il monopolio era della Sinistra ammanicata con il governo e il 
sottogoverno, che pubblicava solo le notizie che riteneva importanti per 
lei.
Si è passati da 10:100 in favore della sinistra a 20:110 (perché i media 
non di sinistra sono ancora molto forti e meglio organizzati).
La capacità comunicativa della "destra", dei "repubblicani", etc. sta 
crescendo, permettendole di comunicare più facilmente con quella larga 
parte della società che condivide (in tutto o in parte) il suo 
orientamento politico.
Qui, poi, entra in ballo la teoria del "Long Tail" applicata alle 
convinzioni politiche, per cui i vecchi partiti (e la vecchia struttura 
politica) fanno fatica a rappresentare le masse, che devono comprarsi 
con il voto un pacchetto sulla cui composizione fanno fatica a intervenire.
Un esempio:
Io sostengo la guerra in Iraq, ma sono contrario alla legge sulla 
fecondazione e la vorrei più libera. Sono per la "flat tax" e per il 
riconoscimento di indennità per i figli a carico che siano indipendenti 
dal reddito.
per alcune cose, sono sicuro che la maggioranza degli italiani sarebbe 
favorevole, ma non possono essere implementate perché la struttura 
politica e partitica impedisce di farli passare; i sostenitori in 
entrambi gli schieramenti sono troppo deboli, mentre gli avversari hanno 
in mano i numeri necessari per far vincere la loro coalizione.
La legge sulla Fecondazione è quella schifezza che è solo perché 
entrambi gli schieramenti hanno la necessità dei democristiani per 
sperare di fare maggioranza.
Sperando che Berlusconi scarichi l'UDC o almeno Follini e C.
Mirco