The Political Spectrum

Ace of Spades (boy, I sure have been linking to him a lot lately, maybe I can be like Garfield Ridge in reverse) brings us the latest from Dan "Courage, courage" Rather. Cue violin.

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said Monday that there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career.

Rather famously tangled with President Nixon and his aides during the Watergate years while Rather was a hard-charging White House correspondent.

Addressing the Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, occasionally forcing back tears, he said that in the intervening years, politicians "of every persuasion" had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a "new journalism order."

He said this pressure -- along with the "dumbed-down, tarted-up" coverage, the advent of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics -- has taken its toll on the news business. "All of this creates a bigger atmosphere of fear in newsrooms," Rather said.

Tarted-up coverage?

Whatever. Clearly Dan is still smarting from being exposed by the "pajama-clad" bloggers. I'm sure that he'll be finding the documentation that proves his "fake but accurate" story about Bush and the National Guard soon enough, probably at about the same time OJ finds the real killers.

But I shouldn't be picking on Danny boy. He, after all, represents the golden age of news reporting - an age when he and his fellow talking heads could take to the air and say whatever the hell they wanted because, well, they had no competetion whatever to speak of. And who was going to call them on their bs? Why, no one, that's who. Ah, to the glories of monopoly power.

But I actually have to agree with Rather about the current state of the news. Quite frankly I can feel precious brain cells being sucked away whenever I have the misfortune of watching television news. And it goes for whatever news it is: Fox News, CNN, ABC, etc. And don't even get me started on local news. It has nothing to do with ideology. Televised news is more about entertainment than infomation.

But Rather doesn't get to play all Mr. Innocent. This is the man who interjected emotionalism in his newscasts. He is as culpable as anyone else for the dumbing down of our news programs.

But it doesn't matter anymore. The era of the big media's domination is at an end. Don't get me wrong, there will always be a place for network and cable news, but their singular domination of the media is over. Click on just about any link to the right of this page and you will hit upon a blog or internet news source that is vastly more informative, interesting, and relevant than anything put out by the big three networks or cable news. If you really want in-depth coverage of the German elections, you are much better off digging on the web than waiting for the big media to get to it. Oh, sure, they'll have a blurb or two, but they're not about to waste too many precious resources covering the national elections of the world's third largest economy when another teen from Alabama can go missing.

And the big media is not solely responsible for their own rotten coverage. The public at large seems to damand this crap, and the networks deliver. Luckily we live in an age where we can seek the news all on our own - at least those of us who so desire it. And besides, who wants to sit in front of a television to be told what the important news of the day is supposed to be when we can be proactive and venture out on our own?

So let Mr. Rather cry his crocodile tears. We'll be here not watching.