Howard Fineman at MS…

Howard Fineman at MSNBC has a great analysis of the dying of a political party. No, it’s not the Republicans or the Democrats he’s referring to. It’s the AMMP, the American Mainstream Media Party that’s being torn apart. It was born during the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, and the Watergate scandal. But that was then, this is now.

Whether he intends it or not, Fineman makes quite a case for the American Liberal Mainstream Media Party, that it exists to promote liberal causes, especially in recent history. Republicans can’t get their word out unmolested via the ALMMP, so they have to go elsewhere; as Fineman notes, “with mailing lists, grassroots politics and direct-mail, first through the Postal Service, then the Internet.” He’s basically exposing the political bias at, among other places, CBS, though, again, I’m not sure he intended that. It is interesting to note that he does acknowledge the lack of (or utterly lost) credibility the media now has. He closes the article this way:

In this situation, the last thing the AMMP needed was to aim wildly at the president — and not only miss, but be seen as having a political motivation in attacking in the first place. Were Dan Rather and Mary Mapes after the truth or victory when they broadcast their egregiously sloppy story about Bush’s National Guard Service? The moment it made air it began to fall apart, and eventually was shredded by factions within the AMMP itself, conservative national outlets and by the new opposition party that is emerging: The Blogger Nation. It’s hard to know now who, if anyone, in the “media” has any credibility.

And, as Walter Cronkite would say, that’s the way it is.

UPDATE: James Taranto, commenting on the same article, has this to say about how well the AMMP got its intended job done (first quoting Fineman):

The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded in good measure (and ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS’s star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon’s fate as the first president to resign.

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born.

The broadcast in which Cronkite declared America “mired in stalemate” and urged withdrawal from Vietnam aired on Feb. 27, 1968. In November of that year, Democrats began an almost unbroken string of electoral losses, including seven of the past 10 presidential elections.

If you accept Fineman’s thesis, then the 2004 election was also a repudiation of the AMMP. As an erstwhile antiwar activist who never renounced his “war crimes” calumnies, Kerry was the perfect candidate of the partisan media. No wonder CBS and others tried to puff up Kerry as a “war hero” while obsessing over supposed deficiencies in President Bush’s National Guard record.

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