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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Suma who wrote (70849)	1/13/2005 7:45:18 AM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

"A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats," Howard Fineman writes at the MSNBC Web site (msnbc.msn.com). "I'm talking about the 'mainstream media,' which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the Internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history," Mr. Fineman said. "Now the AMMP is reeling, and not just from the humiliation of CBS News. We have a president who feels it's almost a point of honor not to hold more press conferences — he's held far fewer than any modern predecessor — and doesn't seem to agree that the media has any 'right' to know what's really going in inside his administration. The AMMP, meanwhile, is regarded with ever-growing suspicion by American voters, viewers and readers, who increasingly turn for information and analysis only to non-AMMP outlets that tend to reinforce the sectarian views of discrete slices of the electorate." The notion of a neutral, nonpartisan mainstream press is, he said, "pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things." "The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded in good measure (and ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS's star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon's fate as the first president to resign. "The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press, but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born."