I'm Foxie

Ok we are officially in a new era of media coverage, you can no longer ignore the shift. How else could you explain top officials from the administration of the President of the United States taking on a major news (or opinion if you prefer) outlet in a war of name calling. White House senior advisor, David Axelrod, was on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos saying that Fox News was not a "real" news organization. At the same time a video of Obama's communications director Anita Dunn surfaces talking about how their team "controlled" the media coverage during the election, forcing the reporters to cover what the Obama team wanted covered.

If you want to go back to when Ronald Reagan was president, I think you can see even then a shift in the relationship with news organizations and politicians. Do you remember the line from "Back to the Future" when Doc Brown in the 1950's has finally accepted that Ronald Reagan is president in the '80's. He says "no wonder your president is a movie star, he has to look good on television". Reagan did look good and came across good on television and I would argue was a "rock star president" when Obama was still in college.

Around this same time you had the tipping point in the proliferation of cable channels and alternative news outlets like CNN. You also started hearing about the "liberal media" a lot more during the Reagan era. Folks in the media are people with opinions and it has become much more accepted for them to express their opinions. Go back to George Stephanopoulos, the guy worked for Bill Clinton before he worked at ABC. (For the record, I actually think Stephanopoulos has done a pretty good job of being unbiased, better in fact than most of ABC's other national anchors)

Fast forward to 2009 and the abundance of blogs, news sites and even comedians delivering the news. (I read a poll that people under the age of 30 listed John Stewart as their number one source for news) We should not be surprised when personal bias starts to seep through in news coverage. What do I mean seeps through, strong opinions is the basis for attracting an audience for many shows today. The problem is it gets harder to know who to believe and we get upset when a new era news outlet does not have the same bias as we do. (I have not heard anyone from the current administration complaining about the obvious left leaning politics at MSNBC, but they sure don't like the right leaning politics of Fox.)

When I go back and listen to Anita Dunn's video, I actually realize she get's it and her team probably did the right thing. Their job was to get their story out and they found a way to work around the bias in today's news media. The part I don't understand is why they can get that complex issue, come up with an effective game plan and yet don't realize it does them no good to go to the mattresses with Fox. Even if you think Fox started the fight, which they did.

My mother always said if you wrestle with a pig, you both get filthy, but the pig enjoys it.

The choice for you and me is we either choose our camp and continue to believe what that camp's "talking heads" tell us or we have to work at this and get a lot smarter by listening to all sides to figure out what we believe for ourselves.

I bet you wish you could go back to just having Walter Cronkite tell you what you needed to know.