The State of the Media
A terrific discussion of what the mainstream media is supposed to be...but isn't.
I grew up in an educated New York home, which means that I grew up reading The New York Times. It’s hard to overstate the role that the “paper of record” played among those of us fortunate enough to call it our hometown newspaper.
My first major research paper—a High School inquiry into whether LBJ lied to the American public about his plans for Vietnam during the 1964 campaign—had me reading through two years of NYTs on microfilm. (Earned me high praise from the librarians at our local community college).
As I moved around the country, I kept my NYT subscription active for years—at times waiting up for delivery to my apartment in Los Angeles. I welcomed it daily as a small piece of home.
Shortly after Abe Rosenthal’s departure in the late 1990s, I noticed a clear and steady decline. It’s been about 20 years since I determined that it was not worth reading.
I wish I could say it was just the NYT, but it wasn’t. I read The Economist cover-to-cover for 20 years. Somewhere between the late Bush and early Obama years it stopped being worthwhile. I appreciated Washington Post during my years living in DC. I also spent many years as an avid reader of The New Republic and The Weekly Standard. Sigh.
By now, the death spiral of our once-great sources of journalism and weekly analysis is well known. There’s not much that I can add to the conversation.
Perhaps the one saving grace is that, over the past few years, I’ve gotten to know and to work with more than a few folks at RealClearPolitics and its related RealClear sites. These folks really are exceptional. In a world whose highest virtues include propagandizing and indoctrinating, these folks are actually still out to inform.
Journalists? Ha! More like dinosaurs. Who in today’s world actually admits that there are multiple sides to an issue—and then presents them? It’s like a throwback to some other era. Balanced news coverage is as much out of vogue as is a college campus committed to civil discourse and the free exchange of idea (like, for example, New College of Florida, where I happen to work on that quixotic project).
Turns out that a couple of years ago, my old go-to news source decided to pick a fight with my current favorite. It took a while, but Carl Cannon provided a detailed, thoughtful, point-by-point rebuttal this morning.
The New York Times vs. RealClear Politics is by far the best piece I’ve seen on the state of today’s media. If you haven’t yet read it, you should.
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For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com
To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).
To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).
To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).
To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.
To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.