Glenn Reynolds notes…

Glenn Reynolds notes that the mainstream media lost almost worse than John Kerry did. Why did they fail in delivering the 15% of the vote that Evan Thomas of Newsweek said they would? Glenn explains:

But they failed. They failed because they don’t have the power that they used to have. And they don’t have the power that they used to have, well, for several reasons:

The first is that they’ve lost their credibility. Their Bush-hatred was so palpable, and so poorly concealed, that even accurate stories reflecting badly on the Administration lost much of their sting because of the unmistakable glee with which they were presented. Add to that the many stories that turned out badly, and the sputtering how-dare-you-question-us response when they were challenged, and there’s not a lot left.

The second, which goes closely with the first, is that there are alternatives. Back in what news people consider the Golden Age — the 1950s and 1960s — there were few alternatives to the three big television networks and local monopoly papers. If they didn’t report something, it wasn’t news. If they did report something, even if their reporting was wrong or dishonest, most people believed it, and few people got the other side of the story. That’s not true anymore. Talk radio, cable news channels, and the Internet have opened up the conversation and allowed for criticism. This has made the bias, and the inaccuracy, and the outright manipulation in the Old Media easier to spot.

It will be very interesting to see the trends in MSM watching/reading. Will they continue to drop as they are, or drop faster? I really don’t think there’s much of a chance that they’ll gain viewership/readership.

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