Media

Its 6am. I've been up for about three hours now doing a new release. A lot of the new release involves waiting for crap to copy or database structures to be updated, etc so I've been reading. And now I'm going to share something with you all. However, don't miss the post below...good stuff.

Anyway, read this. You won't, so I will summarize for you. In a nutshell, back in 1968 after Mayor Daley in Chicago had the police beat the snot out of a bunch of protesters and newsmen at the Democratic convention in Chicago, a guy named Joseph Kraft wrote an article. That article basically addressed some of Daley's 'reasons' for beating people up from the perspective of newspeeps. In essence, what Kraft points out is that at that time the media establishment was run by the upper white middle class. If you don't read anything else here is the key paragraph:

"To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation."

His point is that this upper-income middle class with the ideas were running the show while you had the vast majority of Americans on the traditional fear change side. With me so far?

So the media was out of touch with the public. The larger majority of the public were the traditional conservative types (see the two time election of Nixon for all the proof you need of that) while the media peeps were the left-leaning more liberal types. That's the key concept so far.

Flash forward 40 years in the future and you have basically the opposite of the situation that was going on then. Now you have 'more conservative politics, a more liberal culture and an electorate as divided as ever'. The media, after years of calls of 'left wing biased' have internalized that notion and are super sensitive to such a charge so much that they over compensate (check out the whole Red State blog ordeal at the Washingpost.com if you want a fun example of such overcompensation).

Anyway, that article I linked to drives the point home much better than I ever could. It's a good read.