Speaking of the legacy media and conservatives, Howell Raines (the man who brought you Jayson Blair because it made him feel “more diverse“) has an hilarious piece in The Washington Post on Roger Ailes and Fox News:

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party.

It’s quite an achievement to be so lacking in self-awareness as to be capable of typing that sentence with a straight face. But Mr Raines dutifully hammers home his point:

Many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals… The network has sold a falsified image of the professional standards that developed in American newsrooms and university journalism departments in the last half of the 20th century…
Why can’t American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team?

I don’t think Mr Murdoch would dispute that. Why would he want to belong to Mr Raines’ “team”? It’s shedding readers, advertisers and jobs at an unprecedented rate, in part because it failed to understand that “the professional standards that developed in American newsrooms and university journalism departments in the last half of the 20th century” were the happy by-product of a brief moment of monopoly consolidation that left the likes of Raines free to indulge their preferred model of portentous blandness.

There are two odd aspects of this jeremiad: The first is that Raines advances his argument in the context of the health care debate and feels that it’s somehow false or irresponsible to suggest that there is any other side to the story than that of his “team”. That’s the same position the press takes on “climate change”, to diminishing returns. You can call a man who demands ever narrower bounds of public discourse many things, but “journalist” is not one of them.

The second oddity is that Raines feels his colleagues won’t call out Murdoch because “News Corp., with 64,000 employees worldwide, receives the tender treatment accorded a future employer.” Really? For a start, you hardly ever meet American journalists working abroad, so the idea that cowed LA Times hacks are angling for a gig on The Australian or The Sun in London seems a little far-fetched. In America, Murdoch owns Fox, a couple of tabloids and The Wall Street Journal. If Raines is right and US journalists have concluded that he’ll be the last man standing, that’s rather revealing of what they’ve done to their own industry.

(By the way, there are journalists who call out Rupert Murdoch. It’s just that they don’t fit the Raines model, either.)