Tom Mangan follows up with one more thought on the “Media Casualties” piece.

I understood that you were lampooning the blowdried armchair worriers (as opposed the armchair warriors, each of whom seems to have a weblog), but I felt that someone should rise in defense of the regular people who do what I do for a living. I’ve been told a thousand times, “Tom, we’re not talking about the guy covering the City Council in Des Moines, we’re talking about THE MEDIA.”

Thing is, we’re all “the media” these days. One of the things I haven’t seen among the warbloggers is much recognition that they have become part of the media. Glenn Reynolds gets 30,000 visitors a day and writes for Fox News but still seems to think of the media as someone else. It reminds me of those people who attack the “politicians” while asking us to elect them to political office. Spare me the anti-politics politicians and the anti-media media personalities.

Well, sure. Mr. Berners-Lee is the Gutenberg of our age, and he’s given us all printing presses. And maybe in a few years, most of the American public will be getting their news and opinions from me, and snot-nosed upstarts will be cracking wise at my stupid comments. (Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. Maybe the day after I actually start getting my peanuts.)

UPI columnist Jim Bennett has an interesting piece on this very subject–the possibility that, as Gutenberg’s invention spurred a reformation of the medieval Church, the web will force a similar restructuring of our ossified elite “opinion leaders.” And in fact, to mix a metaphor, though the title said “Media” casualties, I actually meant to use both a broader, and a narrower brush with my rhetorical daisy cutter. Broader in the sense that academia and Hollywood should have been included as well, though the only reference to the former was Sunera Thobani, toward the end (perhaps I should have done something about “Oliver” to handle the tinsel-town intelligentsia…). Narrower in the sense that there are of course many good reporters of integrity out there, doing a good job. Some of them even have journalism degrees, though I remain convinced that this is a handicap–not a credential–for the job. The target was those who not only think that they’re smarter than us, and can and should decide what’s best for us to learn, and what we should think, but who at the same time masquerade as “objective.”

For example, Captain Dan “the Newsman” Rather, proclaims himself to be unstintingly fair and objective in his reporting, but anyone who watches him for five minutes can tell exactly where his sympathies lie. In 1994, as the Republicans won the Congress, he had a look on his face as though terrorists had broken into the CBS studios and were shooting the hostages. In the same recent interview with Bill O’Reilly in which he proclaimed his objectivity, he also stated his opinion that Bill Clinton was “an honest man.” How can we be expected to take such people seriously?

It’s not a matter of dishonesty–I’m sure that Mr. Rather genuinely believes that his personal views don’t affect his reporting. In fact, he may not even believe that he’s a liberal. He probably thinks that his views are in the mainstream, because in the circles that he hangs out in, they are. The media and academia can no more recognize their own liberal bias than fish can recognize water–it’s simply an unescapable feature of their environment.

The modern liberals, at the major papers, in the broadcast empires, and at the universities, have had a lockhold on the levers of information for decades now, but that era is coming to an end, largely due to the web. And if it sounds like I’m saying that as if it’s a good thing, it’s because it is.