A Whole New Kinda Crazy? Maybe Not...

Via TPM, a very insightful piece by Rick Perlstein about the crazies who have emerged this past month to dominate the news. Everything old is new again...

Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. ... It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

At the heart of this is a public that is addicted to the 24-hour news cycle. If the news is slow, the public will tune out, so the editors exert pressure to blow up even the most mundane of stories (a perfect example is the "beer summit" -- some stories focused on the brands of beer selected by the four men and what those selections said about them. This was a what the fuck? moment for me). Viewership is the most important thing, more than holding off on a story unless it can be corroborated, more important than smearing the good name of an otherwise good person with hearsay or rumor. The celebrity status of the news anchor is more important than the content being delivered. Advertising dollars -- i.e., profit -- trumps all.