All Blog Posts from Public Eye

How do we feel about the mainstream media? Sort of how Jack Nicholson said in “A Few Good Men.”

Deep down in places we don't talk about, we want them on that wall. We need them on that wall … Or so a new study suggests.

A survey out of Massachusetts research firm on confidence levels of media consumers alleges that while ObamaGirl may be a nice diversion and blogs can drive some debates, participants trust print media about 5 times more than online options like YouTube, blogs, alternative media or the candidates’ own websites. According to the study, newspapers are seen as credible by 56 percent of participants, as opposed to the "new" media options, which hover around 10 percent. The study's summary begins:

As the 6-month race to the first presidential primaries begins, much attention has focused on some candidates’ presence on the Internet. Obama Girl, Hillary Clinton’s spoof on the Sopranos, and the various sites covering the candidates and campaigns has some traditional media worried about their Internet investment strategy. When Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm undertook a survey of 383 people to better understand the impact and effectiveness of streaming media in political campaigning, it found the buzz about Internet influence – at least at this point in the campaign – was much ado about nothing.

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Last night, the NBC “Nightly News” aired a story on the growing number and influence of blogs – you can watch it here. “What started as lonely voices from laptops are a growing influence in the mainstream media,” correspondent Dawn Fratangelo said in the piece, “Most every news outlet — including our own — now has at least one.”

In the world of media-watching (you’re in it right now) this is not a novel piece of news. The subject has been hashed, and re-hashed, and hashed some more. So, somewhat predictably, some bloggers have reacted to the story with nice helping of snark. Wrote Dreadpundit:

It was one of those newsbits that make you wonder in what decade the mainstream media are living. NBC ran a condescending little piece about blogs as if it were a discovery they had just made (maybe it was.) Now we're "real," we've been on the nightly news.

But in their montage of screenshots and happy patter (including a brief view of The Jawa Report's main [page] - another blog I write for) NBC anchor Brian Williams didn't mention the names of Dan Rather or Eason Jordan.

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If, like me, you spend a good deal of your time reading blogs, you are all too familiar with one phrase (and its abbreviation) and the vitriol that so often accompanies its mention: mainstream media. MSM.



My personal favorite analysis on the subject comes from William Wolfe, who attempted to parse the hatred at McSweeney’s:

Reasons Bloggers Hate the Mainstream Media.


The MSM is too liberal.

Professor always calls on the MSM.

Bloggers got stood up at prom. By the MSM.

But it was Franklin Foer who, in a recent piece in The New Republic, (predictably) struck a chord when he took a swing at the MSB (mainstream blogosphere) for taking swings at the MSM (got all that straight?):

"The mainstream blogosphere (MSB) is only too happy to bury the old media regime, because it has an implicit vision for a new order, one that would largely consist of ... bloggers. In other words, they envision a universe that resembles the nineteenth-century partisan newspapers or the Fleet Street model, where writers and thinkers break from the illusion of "objectivity" and print the "truth." (I acknowledge that the liberal blogosphere is hardly a monolith and that blogs don't always lend themselves to coherent thought, but common themes and arguments are clear enough.)"

Following the “flurry of responses, not all of them friendly,” to the piece, Foer addressed what he felt was readers' literal-minded interpretation of his point:

“People have taken my coinage 'Mainstream Blogosphere' seriously. But I'll be the first to concede that it's a dumb, adolescent term. I simply wanted to highlight the stupidity of the ubiquitous 'Mainstream Media.' There are, of course, lots of liberal bloggers that I respect (e.g. Marshall, Yglesias, Drum) for their reporting, analytical capabilities, and writing. And they shouldn't be lumped with the likes of the ranters and cheap shot artists who I have critiqued. Similarly, CNN, NPR, and The Washington Post are very different beasts, who don't deserve to be polemically lumped together so often. That's just sloppy.

And that set off a semantic argument from Atrios at his blog.

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