Thursday, September 23, 2004

Mr. Rather, Meet Mr. McLuhan

What is Dan Rather but a mechanical product of late print capitalism? Anne Applebaum says the networks are sort of like Norman Mailer, grasping ever more greedily for attention in their creeping lifelessness:
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There is little to be said about the amorphous post-baby boomers -- anyone born after about 1960 or so -- but it's pretty clear that as a group we have no emotional attachment to ABC, NBC and CBS.

The networks have known this for a long time and have therefore spent much of the past decade trying to get us to watch news programs to which we don't feel loyal. Flashy videos, human interest stories, jingly music -- none of it has worked, and indeed their effect has been the opposite of their purpose. When the big three effectively stopped covering political conventions, the nation collectively shrugged -- and changed channels. C-SPAN and PBS viewership spiked this year. During the Republican convention, Fox got the biggest audience of all.

It's only in this context, it seems to me, that the Dan Rather-fake letters fracas marks a fascinating turning point. Otherwise, it's a pretty run-of-the-mill scandal.
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Agreed. Memo-gate is a bit like the attacks in Beslan -- a result of increasing derangement due to increasing desperateness for attention.

UPDATE: Daniel Henninger concurs in the Wall Street Journal that one product of the networks' (not to say the MSM's) loss of agenda-setting power is desperation. But who is setting the Iraq agenda then...? (Hint: it's not the bloggers.) Henninger:

"Much of the programming content coming out of Iraq now is created by a homicidal terrorist named al Zarqawi and distributed by the world's major media outlets. I think there is a content-hungry market for a more expansive view of Iraq, and elsewhere, such as Darfur. Some day, as is happening in the U.S., that market will create competing alternatives. It will be imperfect, but so is what we've had."


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