Pestering media organizations and figures about journalistic integrity when something particularly egregious has happened has a short term benefit, so keep the emails and letters and calls flowing and more power to you.
But there is a caveat:
The depressing truth is that those who think that the MSM can ultimately be shamed into rediscovering Journalism 101 principles of intellectual integrity somehow, aren't fully aware of what is really going on and how powerful, deep and long term the overall trend is.
A King on the Hill syndrome is created when control over information is centralized in the hands of a very few people who auction that control to the highest bidders and get fabulously wealthy by doing so. It can only get more and more intense.
The Mainstream Media is a King on the Hill game and, as it has intensified over the past years and decades, this contest has about crushed the life out of the goose that lays the golden eggs - the classic journalistic ethics that created the credibility that made advertising work in the first place.
Probably, some of the finest minds in journalism who ever lived are now working, but where telling the truth that serves the public interest works against the financial interests of the behind-the-scenes powers, it is hard going. Some of these people have been going into book publishing -or blogging- and have succeeded in escaping the King on the Hill game. Kos is one such person and this site is a harbinger of the future.
On the local level, Experience and Insight tend to go together and the easiest way to keep the news and information system dumbed down is just to keep trimming budgets to make sure that people with real experience are kept to a minimum and kept impressed by what keeps their paychecks coming. Those who prove themselves capable of knowing how to talk the company line while saying, "What company line?" get to move up to the national level.
Meanwhile, the national mainstream media has been less and less subtle about abandoning classic journalistic even-handedness (or keeping bias to less obvious levels) when it comes to Presidential election campaigns, especially since the era of Fox News arrived.
But this trend is not new. It has been developing for decades. Look what happened to Edward R. Murrow.
He won his confrontation with Joe McCarthy, but was bumped upstairs and buried in administrative paperwork. No more "Harvest of Shame" documentaries to shine a spotlight on near slavery wages for agricultural workers to rile up the grocery industry advertisers.
Witness the global warming story (to name just one). Why is it, one might ask, that the largest organizations with the greatest global reach and the best people and resources seem to be so bad at getting the big picture stories right?
At the time in human history that voters need to understand what is going on the most, the organizations best positioned to provide the needed information are the very ones failing in the clutch.
This is beyond boycotts or floods of emails of protestation.
There is a foundation, structural issue at work that can't change and won't because it is fundamental and intrinsic to the way that centrally financed organizations must work.
I had the interesting experience of leading a petition drive against a local newspaper (The Austin American Statesman) back in 1987. This succeeded in producing a meeting in which the publisher, representing Cox Enterprises, and the editor of the paper took complaints and tough criticism from about two hundred citizens for about four hours.
The result: They adopted an advertising slogan for billboards and T-shirts and coffee mugs that said, "You should see what we said today!"
At issue then was a shocking obviousness of bias in coverage of an election. At the local level, real estate developer candidates versus neighborhood people. The same sort of bias we see in the MSM today in this nation election over twenty years later.
The depressing truth is that those who think that the press can ultimately be shamed into rediscovering Journalism 101 principles of intellectual integrity somehow, aren't fully aware of what is really going on and how powerful, deep and long term the overall trend is.
The case for optimism is in the possibility that exists comes with the internet, and ensuring that "net neutrality" isn't quashed by the same interests that dominate the King on the Hill game we call Mainstream Media.
A big picture way of looking at the internet and human history is that all of the most brilliant inventors and innovators who have made modern electronics possible over the past century or so have been building something that could be crucial to planetary human survival potential.
What we are headed towards is a prosthetic capability that could put all of the best intellects in the entire human population online in a way that assures that no one is subservient to vested interest gatekeepers or government officials jealous of ordinary citizens.
The mainstream media, so-called, has served a purpose in terms of this evolution, but has shown, especially in this election cycle, that there is limit to what the system is capable of in terms of serving the information needs of an intelligent population. The MSM may be passing into history before our eyes, going the way of the Pony Express and steam locomotives.
This future won't come about between now and November, so any efforts to point out the need to pay at least token attention to journalistic integrity could help a little. But the change that is coming with the next generation of electronics, as it is combined with the twin social urgencies of truth-telling and mobilizing- could begin to create a new paradigm for the 21st Century as an Information Age in the best meaning of the phrase.
2008 could become the year to put on the tombstone for the MSM, as future historians look back.
Anybody want to put on black and begin grieving over this?
I didn't think so.
But it doesn't do a lot of good to just passively anticipate the future. There is every danger that the King on the Hill game will annex the internet so it is only a new episode in the centralization of information.
The future that Orwell saw in 1984 is still a prospect. We must each do what we can to promote the right legislation, prevent wrong legislation and to keep tecnological innovation that serves the First Amendment ethic as free from any contraints as possible.
This is the Magna Carta struggle of our era.