The Crowbar

NRO’s Mark Steyn covers a WaPo editorial by Dino-Defender Michael Gerson:

Michael Gerson has lousy timing. In The Washington Post, in one of those now familiar elegies for old media, he writes:

And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don’t produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain.

That’s laughably untrue in the Warmergate story. If you rely on the lavishly remunerated “climate correspondents” of the big newspapers and networks, you’ll know nothing about the Climate Research Unit scandals – just the business-as-usual drivel about Boston being underwater by 2011

Steyn’s point is that Climategate and stories like it prove the legacy media is not the basis for the entire media food chain.

I would add that Gerson is being an arrogant elitist snob. The truth the legacy media doesn’t want to face is that ANYBODY can be a journalist. The reign of the legacy media is coming to an end because they’ve compromised their journalistic principles. The moment the legacy media decided to stifle debate and convey only the liberal point of view is the moment they lost their legitimacy.

Then there’s another story on Patterico about the LA Times’ James Rainey’s weird assertion that the ACORN stings by O’Keefe and Giles were not journalism: 

The duo certainly has caused a stir — and raised questions about an organization that in the past had received substantial government funding — but, sorry folks, please don’t call this journalism.

AND

So what sort of creature does this make O’Keefe? I don’t disagree with his observation in a previous interview with The Times that he follows the mold of filmmaker Michael Moore, using confrontation to get at his version of the truth.

Can you believe this guy? If a non-media liberal had gone undercover with camera to expose illegal advice-giving at Catholic Charities, who received at least $17.8 Million in taxpayer money in 2003, would Rainey likewise condemn the individual as un-journalistic? Please.

The legacy media has clearly betrayed any pretense of objectivity in favor pro-liberal activist journalism. Embracing your bias and using your position to further your agenda is the signature maneuver of Postmodernism, which metastasized in journalistic circles in the 1990’s: From Philip Gold’s 1996 article Postmodern journalism offers the wrong end of the shtick:

Postmodernism” is a wondrous word. Everybody uses it; nobody’s sure what it means. Still, we know it when we see it. Academia’s gone postmodern. So have politics and culture. And now, journalism’s heading down the same dreary road.

Gold goes on:

The postmodernist shtick has four elements.

First, it denies the existence of objective reality, as opposed to saying that reality’s out there but we never can get fully at it. To the postmodernist, everything in the universe, from comic books to galaxies, is “text” to be “interpreted” by the “self-referent,” that is, people whose only frame of reference — dare we say, only reality — is themselves.

Second, postmodernism denies the existence of firm boundaries. Everything flows into, affects and becomes everything else. (“The personal is political”; “The planetary is personal”; “Insanity is just another lifestyle”; etc.)

Third, postmodernism denies the validity of standards — of truth, morality, excellence, competence. All are arbitrary at best and tyrannical at worst.

Finary, postmodernism views all human relationships as power struggles. Words are weapons, not carriers of truth or meaning.

Sounds a lot like our friends in the legacy media, no? Gold predicted the outcome we’re seeing today:

So what’s the answer? Thy tighter editorial control and the prompt stockading of any senior executive who claims that serious journalism inevitably must go the way of Hard Copy and pompous-pundit screamathons. Still, the ultimate fix must rest with the larger society. In the end, our civilization will junk postmodernism. Neither truth, boundaries nor standards can be denied forever, and life is more than power games. There already are signs that it’s happening, especially in the schools and universities where it began. So, in the short term, perhaps the interesting question is not “How will journalism escape from postmodernism?” but, “How will it cover the demise?”

Thirteen years later we know that the legacy media still desperately holds on to it’s postmodernist worldview and derides all others as non-journalists. The new media has provided the outlet for the anti-postmodernism backlash and the legacy media thusly treats the new media with extreme contempt. 

Journalism will survive the postmodernist legacy media because journalism is not dependent on any institution. Journalism belongs to those who are willing to seek the truth, find it, and tell it to those who want to hear it. And, nearly everyone wants to hear it.