The End of Big Media
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Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Richard Poe
Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2002When you throw your best punch and the guy is still standing, you'd better run, and run fast. You don't have what it takes to beat him.
Big Media took their best punch at the American people last week. But we came back swinging. This does not augur well for the future of Big Media in America.
On Friday morning, the Senate voted 77-23 to authorize President Bush to wage war on Iraq, with or without United Nations approval. This was a crushing blow for ABC, NBC, CBS and The New York Times, all of which had made extraordinary efforts to torpedo Bush's war resolution.
"Public Says Bush Needs to Pay Heed to Weak Economy," cried the front page of The New York Times Monday. Citing a New York Times/CBS News poll, the article claimed that Americans wanted Bush to focus on the economy, not Iraq.
Why, then, was Bush committing political suicide by demanding a war vote only four weeks before congressional elections? The Times had an answer: Bush was being manipulated by a cabal of war-mongering Jews!
Times pundit Maureen Dowd – an Irish Catholic – explained:
"Influential Jewish conservatives inside and outside the administration have been fierce in supporting a war on Saddam, thinking it could help Israel by scrambling the Middle East map and encouraging democracy."
Talk radio host Don Imus pressed NBC Pentagon reporter Jim Miklaszewski for details on the conspiracy. NewsMax.com reported the following exchange.
IMUS: Who are these Jews 'Mo' Dowd's referring to as influencing Bush on the war? Wolfowitz? Richard Perle? Who?
MIKLASZEWSKI: Well, certainly there's that – what many would call a cabal within the administration – of not only those who are very much in favor of going into Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein a la an invasion – and one of the strongest voices within the administration, of course, is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
Miklaszewski hastened to add, however, that the "cabal" included some non-Jews as well.
Cabal or no cabal, the Times' own poll showed that Americans supported war on Iraq 67 percent to 27 percent. After sifting through the raw survey data, Brit Hume of Fox News and Dick Morris of the New York Post both concluded that the Times had misrepresented its own polling data. Indeed, the survey itself was questionable.
"The phrasing of the questions is so slanted and biased that it amounts to journalistic `push polling,' " Morris charged.
Push polls, slanted headlines, Jewish conspiracies – this was strong stuff. But it was only a warm-up for the big event – a total blackout of Bush's speech that night, by all three major broadcast networks. While Bush made his case for war with Iraq, tens of millions of Americans who wanted to hear him searched the airwaves in vain.
"The president's 30-minute address was measured, understated, devastating and profoundly important. It's a speech all Americans should have heard," wrote John Podhoretz in the New York Post the next morning. "But only one of the broadcast networks, Fox, chose to air it."
ABC, CBS and NBC filled that time slot instead with "The Drew Carey Show," "King of Queens" and "Fear Factor," respectively. After the speech, however, the networks found plenty of airtime to attack Bush's arguments.
Spokesmen for the networks claim it wasn't personal – just business. Bush's speech didn't seem newsworthy enough to justify interrupting their regular programming.
"Hey, war's big, but this is the month that broadcast networks are rolling out or reprising their prime-time schedules," says MSNBC editor-in-chief Jerry Nachman. All-news MSNBC showed the speech, but its sister company NBC did not.
If blacking out Bush's speech was indeed a business decision, then it was a singularly poor one. The New York Times reports that, despite the blackout, Bush's speech "was still one of the most-watched television events of the evening."
Nielsen Media Research estimates that up to 17 million people watched the speech on the Fox broadcast network and the three all-news cable networks, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC.
By contrast, only 4.5 million people watched "The Drew Carey Show" on ABC; 11.7 million watched "King of Queens" on CBS; and 12.2 million watched "Fear Factor" on NBC.
"The address handily beat its direct competition on the other broadcast networks," noted a sheepish New York Times.
If Big Media continue making these kinds of, ahem, "business" decisions, the long, slow decline of the major networks, long chronicled in the trade press, may soon accelerate into a screaming, hurtling roller-coaster ride to ratings oblivion.
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Richard Poe is a New York Times best-selling author and cyberjournalist. For more information on Poe and his writings, visit his Web site, RichardPoe.com. He may be reached at richardpoe@aol.com.
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Tammy Bruce’s "The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds"