I’ll Watch The MSM Carefully

The Benghazi hearings may well be a smoking gun – but it all depends upon how the networks tell the story, and I don’t have much hope there. We shall see in just hours, but it will require that they not just report but assign reporters to follow up on the threads of the story.

You may recall that the Watergate mess, where no one died and it was indeed a two-bit burglary, was highlighted and headlined for WEEKS.

Despite the feel-good of the conservatives, FOX News is just a tiny portion of the overall news gathering business, and while it dominates the cable industry it is barely a pimple on the ass of the networks. That is regrettable, but it is true. Yes, networks are losing viewers and cable gaining them, but it is still no contest.

Added to that, the general knowledge of the political consumer is strictly fourth grade level.

All of this to say that the Main Stream Media still dominates, and whatever impact Drudge, Rush, and O’Reilly have is only to the already converted and convinced.

Conservatives are just like liberal New York Film Critic, Pauline Kael, who is reported to have said of Nixon, “How did he win? No one I know voted for him.” That is probably a digest of what she actually said, and it is used to demonstrate the stovepipe in which liberals live, but conservatives are just as guilty. We tend to associate with other conservatives, and we probably wonder how Obama won a second term because no one we know voted for him.

In truth, the majority of Americans are clueless – not just about politics. While everyone should work to change this, it is far beyond the ability of FOX, or Drudge – or any combination of people – to change in our lifetime. It is obvious that people, in general, believe, both individually and collectively, they can consume more than they produce, because they believe that others will produce more than they can consume and share.