The Press

Don Hewitt, creator of “60 Minutes” and veteran TV-news guy, thinks that the way to entice viewers back to network news is to increase its proportion of opinion-based content. This is delusional thinking, given that

-Network news is already full of opinions. That’s part of why it has lost so many viewers.

-Making opinions explicit doesn’t insure an audience any more than starting a blog does. To gain viewers’ loyal attention (as opposed to merely riling them up and driving even more of them away), opinions have to be thoughtful and provide unique perspective. It’s not enough to be sincere, you have to add something to the public conversation if you want viewers to come back, and all of the good political bloggers and op-ed commentators know this. But does anyone think that the people who run network news are capable of doing it, given that many of them, like Hewitt, refuse to acknowledge that their networks’ biased, error-prone reporting is a large part of the problem?

-The Internet is awash in high-quality commentary, available from every ideological perspective and generally free. It’s difficult to make money selling something that a lot of other people are giving away.

UPDATE: Data

Anyone who follows CNBC knows that the “Kudlow & Cramer” show recently became “Kudlow & Company.” This is great news on a couple of levels. First, it frees Larry Kudlow to go his own thoughtful, optimistic, free-market way, no longer hamstrung by Jim Cramer‘s discordant style and liberal politics. Having these two men co-host a show seems in hindsight to have been a waste of both of their talents, and particularly of Kudlow’s. The show was good before, but Larry’s new solo act has quickly distinguished itself as by far the best daily politics-and-economics show on TV.

Second, it is great news because it shows that CNBC management, which has given the impression of being unimaginative and politically doctrinaire, may be responsive to reality after all. (These are the same people who canceled the unique WSJ editors’ show and ran a dime-a-dozen liberal talking-head show in its place.) It looks as though either CNBC woke up to the fact that its hottest property is a socially conservative free-market economist, or someone high up at GE got fed up with CNBC’s tacitly statist, anti-business editorial policy and insisted that Kudlow be given his own show. Either way it’s progress.

I expect this kind of thing from Reuters, the NYT, sometimes the AP. But Drudge? The headline seems to suggest that U.S. troops tried to murder a released journalist-hostage in Iraq. The cited AP story has a more accurate headline: “U.S. Fires on Car Carrying Freed Hostage”. Even better would have been the full story: After week of car bombings, U.S. troops mistakenly fire on unidentified vehicle carrying freed hostage as it approaches checkpoint at night. Not as much drama in that one, just the truth.

Drudge is usually pretty good about avoiding MSM-style tendentiousness, but in this case I think he overdid the evenhanded spin. If he has a systematic flaw it’s his tendency, after a string of stories that favor one side in a controversy, to emphasize stories that favor the other side. Sometimes he sensationalizes events out of all proportion to their significance.

UPDATE: I agree with the commenters who suggest that we do not yet know enough about this incident to assume that it was inappropriate for U.S. troops to shoot at the car. It may be that they did exactly the right thing under the circumstances. Obviously there will be an investigation, and just as obviously some media people (I don’t mean Drudge) are going to try to use this unfortunate event as a weapon against the U.S. regardless of what actually happened.

The able Bernard Kerik is out but underperformin’ Norman Mineta stays. It doesn’t take much insight to realize that it should have been the other way around. What’s going on?

These outcomes seem to be a function of appearances — Kerik’s household employee may have been an illegal immigrant; Mineta is a prominent Asian-American Democrat — rather than substance. Yet here, as in other areas of public life (cf., our abortive initial assault on Falluja), decisions based on appearances can have real consequences.

What drives the destructive public emphasis on politically-correct appearances is, largely, the mainstream press, which, as Robert Kaplan argues, derives much power from its ability to frame questions and hence issues. It also has an elitist, legalistic, statist and appeasement-oriented international power agenda that’s at odds with much of America’s public policy, if not some of its fundamental values.

The medieval age was tyrannized by a demand for spiritual perfectionism, making it hard to accomplish anything practical. Truth, Erasmus cautioned, had to be concealed under a cloak of piety; Machiavelli wondered whether any government could remain useful if it actually practiced the morality it preached. . . Today the global media make demands on generals and civilian policymakers that require a category of perfectionism with which medieval authorities would have been familiar. Investigative journalists may often perform laudatory service, but they have also become the grand inquisitors of the age, shattering reputations built up over a lifetime with the exposure of just a few sordid details. . .

One corollary of all this is that people like Bernard Kerik, who was probably an excellent choice to head Homeland Security (for some background on his success in another security bureaucracy, see this article about his reform of the NYC prison system), get derailed for reasons having nothing to with whether they can do the job. Another corollary is that cautious mediocrities like Norman Mineta (Supreme Court Justice David Souter is another good example) become politically valuable far beyond their deserts, simply because they habitually avoided saying, writing or doing anything for which the press might later take them to task if things didn’t work out.

I think Kaplan is too pessimistic, because he ignores the beneficial role played by the new media (including himself, in his highly successful role as an independent journalist and analyst whose work is widely read on the Internet) in serving as a check on old media. His diagnosis of the problem is thus part of the cure. Increasing numbers of citizens get their information from nontraditional sources and are becoming alert to MSM tendentiousness.

However, his discussion of the behavior of the old (“mainstream”) media is spot on. The MSM are powerful players in modern geopolitics, and pursue an agenda that is often hostile to that of open societies with totalitarian enemies. Western public officials, particularly American ones, have been slow to figure this out. It is extremely important that they learn better to use the MSM to advance their own agenda, and to counter the agendas advanced by the MSM themselves, and by media-savvy totalitarians for whom press manipulation is now a basic military tactic.