With the recent explosion of stories that have spun out of control for the Obama administration and generally left-leaning traditional media, it strikes me that the collapse of the old media paradigm is just beginning to be felt in a big way. The IRS scandal, Benghazi, and Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors are the kind of stories that, back before so many people were online, might have been effectively contained by a sympathetic media. The IRS scandal is big news, obviously, but I can remember other scandals that were just as bad, but somehow kept under control by the major media outlets. The Clinton campaign taking money from agents of the People’s Republic of China during the ’96 election, for example, struck me as one of the most brazenly crooked things imaginable, but it never went as far as it should have in the press. The entire affair was remarkably well-managed.
1996 happened to be the last year before the Internet really took off as a popular medium, so there was no good alternative to the newspapers and TV networks. And even after people began to go online en masse, it took years for online journalism to gain any credibility. The Drudge Report was an early success story, but there weren’t many others at the time. As I remember, the Internet was more associated with pornography than with news for at least a few years after it became popular. I think Bill Clinton was lucky for that — there was enough odd stuff going on in his administration that there’s no telling what might have come up in today’s environment.
Blogging, for its part, didn’t really come into its own until around 2005, and maybe even a bit later. As it matured, and online classified ads took a bite out of newspapers’ profits, the big papers started to founder. In the last fifteen years their decline has been remarkable, and although many are moaning about the end of traditional journalism, I don’t see it as a big loss. If the journalism of the end of the 20th century is characteristic of traditional journalism, then good riddance! It was about as biased as it gets, and unfortunately much of the refuse from that time has managed to hang on in one way or another. But today these people are no longer dominant. The fact that so many truly diverse blogs and sites with different perspectives from theirs have emerged shows them to be the partisan shills that they are.
I’m not sure we can come to any firm conclusions quite yet – it will be easier to see what’s going on now in hindsight – but there’s something noticeably different in the air. It just seems that they can’t contain stories and control discourse like they used to.
For example, Kermit Gosnell had been operating his charnel house for decades, and I’m sure a lot of people knew about it, but if he’d been busted in, say, 1988, we probably wouldn’t have heard much about him. He might not even have been charged with murder, because the photos wouldn’t have been disseminated. It turns out there’s another guy in Texas who has allegedly been doing the same thing for a long time, and now it looks like he’s going down, too.
Why is he being investigated? Because somebody put the evidence online, and you can’t ignore that kind of stuff (you can find a link to it in the article linked above — I’m too squeamish to post it or even look at it myself).
Even Benghazi might have been successfully “managed,” but there are pictures of Ambassador Stevens’ corpse online, and evidence of a coverup has leaked all over the place. The IRS story, for its part, has legs online because there’s no effective filtering of the documents coming out, and many of those involved are telling their side of it to any blogger who will listen.
As the big city papers slowly fade away and network television news ceases to have an authoritative voice (both literally and figuratively), all these crazy things are coming to light. It isn’t that they weren’t there before, but that journalists just didn’t talk about them. Editors would pick and choose, and editors were, for the most part, in agreement with other editors about what’s fit to print. That’s all out the window now, and it’s finally starting to make a palpable difference. It’s about time.
