Lamestream Lament

A piece of free advice: whenever you see an article with the byline James Q. Wilson, read it.

In yesterday’s OpinionJournal, Mr. Wilson has a piece analyzing the effects of the press on the Global War on Terror. It is simply excellent. Go read the whole thing! The conclusion:

Most of what I have said here is common knowledge. But it is common knowledge about a new period in American journalistic history. Once, powerful press owners dictated what their papers would print, sometimes irresponsibly. But that era of partisan and circulation-building distortions was not replaced by a commitment to objective journalism; it was replaced by a deep suspicion of the American government. That suspicion, fueled in part by the Vietnam and Watergate controversies, means that the government, especially if it is a conservative one, is surrounded by journalists who doubt almost all it says. One obvious result is that since World War II there have been few reports of military heroes; indeed, there have been scarcely any reports of military victories.

This change in the media is not a transitory one that will give way to a return to the support of our military when it fights. Journalism, like so much scholarship, now dwells in a postmodern age in which truth is hard to find and statements merely serve someone’s interests.

The mainstream media’s adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy.

Mr. Wilson doesn’t propose any solutions. Personally, I think the marketplace is in the process of supplying them right now: on the whole, the lamestream media is failing as a business — with the notable exceptions of the “fair and balanced” Fox news, right-leaning DrudgeReport, and a number of specific centrist-to-conservative shows (think Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Tammy Bruce, Roger Hedgecock, etc.). Lamestream left-leaning leaders the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are either going to change their content or die; they are publicly and visibly in trouble right now. In my local San Diego, just this week the Copley management announced they were selling off all their newspapers except the flagship Union-Tribune (so far left that they have called Nancy Pelosi “too conservative"!) — because they want to concentrate on saving it. This is the sort of corporate behavior that precedes large change.

But if you’d like more immediate change, try my solution: just don’t listen to, or read, the lamestream media. Go cold turkey. Get your news and commentary from well-chosen blogs, second-tier news sources, alternative news sources, etc. Start with the blogs (you won’t go wrong with the list at right); they will point you to new and interesting sources of information and perspective every day…