Media Navel-gazing In NY

They had a navel-gazing session on new media vs. old media today at the Museum of Television and Radio Media Center in NYC, blogged by Jeff Jarvis and also attended by Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt said

I came away impressed by the talent and seriousness of the news professionals, but also convinced that they simply will never see that the source of their dissolving credibility is the ideological imbalance in their journalist workforce. I brought this point up a couple of times, but it was rejected as was the relevance individual writers/reporters/editors' political positions, voting records, and world views.

The problem is trust, Hewitt went on to say on his radio show, and the problem with the MSM is that the center-right audience of the MSM does not feel that it gets a fair hearing from the MSM. So they are drifting away.

Hewitt also planted a bomb by saying that

that the biggest sustained audience in broadcast is Rush Limbaugh at 20 million a week and because those people trust him. He says Rush is rebranding himself as “America’s anchor in contrast to drive-by media.”

Rush is important because he created his format and his audience himself, Hewitt said. Walter Cronkite happened along as just the right guy in the right place at the right time. But Rush has created something that they said couldn’t be done.

Why won’t the MSM admit their bias and become “transparent?” What do they gain by their absolute claim of objectivity? I suspect the answer is that if they admitted their bias then they’d have to hire people from the other side of the room. That would be OK; it might after all be interesting to have the odd conservative knocking around the newsroon. But it would mean less jobs for them and their pals. That is the real sticking point. It’s about the jobs and the glittering prizes.