It's articles like this that chronicle the death of mainstream media. Every time the media, left, right, or center, embarrass their readers by demonstrably leading them astray on the facts of a current events controversy, the credibility of their media outlet suffers and they lose consumers. I don't say they lose customers because the mainstream media's customers are advertisers, not their readers or viewers. A loss of consumers is a significant loss of revenue only in that the customers (advertisers) won't pay as much to reach fewer people.
Thus the media buy each other up to shore up their consumer numbers and more and more people go off to alternate media to get their facts and opinions. It's not even a matter of ideology, per se. If I'm on the right wing or the left wing, what I care most about is having enough of the important facts of the day to live my life and not be exposed as woefully ignorant. And unless I live my life in an echo chamber, a steady diet of biased news is going to leave me both misinformed and under-informed. That's unacceptable and it's why I have a wide variety of reading and why a growing number of people are following that line.
Eventually, the mainstream press will grow moribund as shrinking revenues make them less and less able to maintain their content standards and thus their readership, eviscerating their attractiveness to advertisers. They will enter a fallow period until some entrepreneur will do for TV what Rush Limbaugh did for AM Radio. But this regeneration will only happen after they hit rock bottom and stay there a good while.
Posted by TMLutas at March 30, 2004 01:50 PM