Dying For An A
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted Monday, April 27, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Media: From once-revered print institutions to formerly dominant TV giants, the major media are crumbling. And the White House press secretary just told them why, "grading" them a "strong A" — A for acquiescence.
The climax of a presidential election, then the first weeks of a new presidency, should be a news organization's peak season. But on Monday it was reported that average daily circulation of 395 newspapers surveyed dropped by more than 7% from October to March vs. the same period a year earlier.
The decline dwarfed those of the two previous six-month periods — 4.6% from April to September 2008 and 3.6% from October 2007 to March 2008, as calculated by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
The New York Times suffered a 3.6% drop over the latest six months, while the Los Angeles Times fell 6.6%.
In TV news, meanwhile, once-untouchable CNN has often finished fourth in the prime time ratings this year — below even its spinoff sister network, Headline News.
Fox News Channel long ago cemented its grip as cable king, with hard-hitting programs like "The O'Reilly Factor" and "Hannity" that unapologetically scrutinize the Obama administration and Congress, as a new era of massive government expansion unfolds.
Contrast Fox with Time magazine, which just placed Barack Obama on its cover for the 13th time over the past year, declaring the president's "combination of candor and vision and the patient explanation of complex issues" to be "Obama at his best." Time says he's bringing America away "from the quick-fix, sugar-rush, attention-deficit society of the postmodern age."
That line must have earned an A-plus from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who recently took it upon himself to give the White House press corps a collective report card affixed with a gold star, telling reporters he was awarding them "a strong A" for their coverage of the administration's first 100 days.
(Imagine the firestorm if Bush press chief Ari Fleischer had decided to present a report card to the press in 2001.)
Why the decline of the establishment media? The Internet, of course, lets us all choose from a countless array of news sources, couched in whatever political philosophy each of us fancies. Today, why bother buying a paper? (Unless, like Investor's Business Daily, each issue features a treasure chest of valuable information unavailable elsewhere.)
But we're also now all finally liberated from what the media have been for so long: an echo chamber for the mind-set of big government, high taxes, subpar national defense and cultural radicalism. In their case, an A from Gibbs fails.
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