Close the barn door if you like. That horse is gone - if it was ever in the barn to start with.

It's got to bleed more to lead. Dramatic logic: if it can be made to feel compelling, then it exists. Dramatic logic is confirmed by the fact that it gains the most attention. Not what they supposedly teach, but what they actually do. Secondly, I don't think there are more than 1% of journalists who can distinguish fact from opinion and half of those think opinion - or "making a difference" - is more important.

Somebody still reads MSM news?

There is NO objective paper "press" anymore with the limited exception of the Opinion page of the WSJ, and the actual hard copies of NR & Weekly Standard, and perhaps a few others. The rest of print and almost (excluding FNC for the most part) all of the TV/Cable media is Revisionist and Propagandist, pure and simple.

Quick answer to "how the working members of the media can live with their biased liberalism — yet not allow it to permeate their work": They cannot.

There's a pretty good article at TNR today, which makes the point that the very nature of journalism makes this sort of reaction inevitable.

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The answer would entail making more deliberate, careful, & thoughtful responses to events. But to act thus would entail a mental outlook which would make a person less likely to go into journalism, and less likely to be hired if he did.

The talent for saying something intelligent in a few worlds, in a way which makes your audience likely to want to read you, is not common. When space and time and capacity make this difficult, it's easy to see that intelligence will be jettisoned first.

No more common is the attitude that "think[s] you are men, deem[s] it not impossible for you to err". The commentariat cannot seem to help viewing themselves as all-seeing, and assuming that their own knowlege & intellect is sufficient to weigh in on anything which arises. Working under pressure of time, they ignore anything they cannot understand in 5 minutes. The ability to question one's own biases and understanding just gets in the way.

Least common of all is the ability to get to the real core of disputes; to see the essence of a questions & not be sidetracked by accidentals. Note the degree to which military metaphor was the object of discussion. That is, vocabulary simpliciter, rather than the context or meaning. It was enough to denounce the words "armed and dangerous"; why bother asking "armed with what?" and "dangerous in what sense?".

Check out Paul (Dont Call Me Stupid!) Krugman's latest, in which 2 of 16 paragraphs actually purport to explain the "moral divide", and then give an analysis at the 6th grade level:

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Of course, there are a few who can do this well; NR was founded by one. But it's too much to ask the the majority do more than reflect one anothers' groupthink back and forth among themselves.

Of course, like heated political debates themselves, none of this is new. But then, neither a long memory or a knowlege of the past, are often found in the media.

In short: all the traits needed for a rational discussion tend to be selected out of the group chosen to do the discussing. That's not going to change.

There are generally three visions for what the news media will become. One is the status quo, which Tony rightly points out is untenable for a fair and meaningful democracy.

The second vision is that the excesses of the left in the media will compel the creation of a strong code of ethics for news reporting (as opposed to commentary, although there are still ethical considerations in the persuasive art as well) and that such a code can clean up the excesses. The problem with this vision is that many on the left like to pretend this is what we have now, and that it is only Fox that has muddied the waters by targeting a conservative audience. This claim defies reason, but remains popular among the left because it is politically convenient and provides a steady reinforcement of the world view of American liberals. The other problem with this vision is working out just what such a code will look like and how it will be enforced. Given the First Amendment, self-enforcement or some kind of associational enforcement are the most likely answers. Both are subject to the same politicizing forces we see with the status quo, particularly since the majority of news organizations run to the left.

The third vision is that the media will become diverse and openly partisan and that people will choose their sources for information. The weaknesses of this vision are the potential compartmentalization of society - if people do not investigate opposing arguments with at least minimal rigor, and the need for an adequate level of media literacy in the general population, to enable people to fairly analyze and evaluate the information they are receiving. Given that media literacy is a product of education, attempts to improve this skill among the population are likely to face the challenge of coming from a left-dominated Academy. (One side note is that the diversification of media will probably hew to a dualistic nature - left and right, Democrat and GOP - rather than a broader spectrum, because of the difficulty of maintaining media organizations for smaller populations with a particular worldview. There will be/are exceptions of course.)

Of the three, the third vision seems to be the direction we're headed in, coming out of the first. The second might be more preferable though, should there be an acceptable solution to the challenges of maintaining a truly fair code and self-policing. This vision is one that could help promote a more civil and rigorous dialogue. Given the current politicization though and the intellectual dishonest of some on the left about the media, the prospects for this vision are increasingly grim.

Just a distillation of some thoughts on the subject, FWIW.

One point I forgot to make: What does one expect from the left, whose intellectual cutting edge has, over the past generation, been pushing the notion that there is no objective reality anyway, only "narratives of power"?

Ideas do have consequences.

@cb_10:

"Of the three, the third vision seems to be the direction we're headed in, coming out of the first."

Wouldn't you agree that most of the western world already operates within the framework of your third vision? Italy, Germany the UK - they all have newspapers, and perhaps to a lessor degree broadcast networks, that tilt either heavily to the left, or heavily to the right with a smaller percentage that are a bit more centrist.

I think your worries are not unfounded, but these other countries have managed to thrive even with the potential problems you've outlined.

Then again, it's not uncommon to see fist-fights in the Parlamento Italiano. And, the UK House of Commons sometimes more closely resembles the Jerry Springer Show. Maybe Europe has found that this "civility" thing is wholly overrated.

This post is spot on. It's the perfect example of exactly how to speak in a language that competes directly with the left's narrative. They want to stop and reflect? Well, yes, lets do just that. Let's have a national dialogue about the failure of mainstream media.

Imagine if the facts of the AZ shooting were exactly the same, but with the added fact that the shooter had attended a Tea Party rally or two within the past year. If such a "connection" between the shooter and the Tea Party existed (however minimal), the media probably would have succeeded in destroying the Tea Party. Never mind that the shooter was insane, or that his actions had nothing to do with the Tea Party objectives, or that it is egregiously unfair for a nationwide grassroots movement to be defined by the actions of one person. The media would have used the opportunity to extinguish the Tea Party. As we have seen, the media already has proven itself to be perfectly willing to attempt to destroy the Tea Party even in the absence of any facts. Image if they had a fact or two to work with.

Given the media's rabid anti-Tea Party animus, the legitimacy of the Tea Party now hangs on the actions of anyone who has ever attended a Tea Party rally. It is only a matter of time before the media will succeed in finding a "link" between the Tea Party and some act of violence and the media frenzy will not stop until the Tea Party is killed off. The Tea Party's days are numbered.