Jay Rosen -- what comes around, goes around

Jay Rosen is a journalism professor at NYU. Yesterday he had a long post in his blog discussing how the press should react to what he calls efforts by the Bush White House De-Certifying the Press. He quotes the responses of a variety of different journalists on his previous posts complaining of the way this White House has refused to be very responsive to the press corps. Bush and his staff have candidly said that this press corps does not represent the people. Rosen and his friends are outraged.

What was truly amazing to me while reading all the various posts is how steadfast all the journalists are in their refusal to make any effort to look at the issue from the president's perspective. They refuse to even consider the idea that the news media might be biased against Bush (much less the evidence that they are a partisan special interest group purposefully working to defeat him and willing to engage in massive distrortions, lies and fraud to do so).

Jay and his friends would do well to consider the opinion of the nation's premier political journalist, Michael Barone. For those of you who are unfamiliar with his bio, he is a graduate of Harvard and Yale Law School, a former Democratic political activist, and a former member of the Washington Post editorial board for 8 years. He has been a journalist for almost 25 years.

Given his experience working to elect Democrats and his quarter-century as a journalist, you might think that Jay would take even a moment to wonder if perhaps there might be a little truth in what Barone had to say about the press in the last election. Barone wrote:

It was a bad election for Old Media. More than in any other election in the last half-century, Old Media -- The New York Times and CBS News, joined often but not always by The Washington Post, other major newspapers, ABC News and NBC News -- was an active protagonist in this election, working hard to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush and doing what it could for John Kerry. The problem for Old Media is that it no longer has the kind of monopoly control over political news that it enjoyed a quarter-century ago. And its efforts to help John Kerry proved counterproductive.
...

The left liberalism that is the political faith of practically all the personnel of Old Media is now being challenged by the various political faiths of New Media. Old Media no longer controls the agenda.

But it tries. At two crucial points in the campaign, Old Media used leaks from dubious sources to run stories intended to hurt the Bush campaign.
...

Memo to future Democratic nominees: You can no longer rely on Old Media to hush up stories that hurt your cause. Your friends in Old Media don't have a monopoly any more.

Jay, the president is treating the press precisely the way that any sane person would treat people who are trying to destroy him. Because of the new media, he doesn't have to use you any more to communicate with the people. If the press doesn't like it, perhaps they should stop trying to destroy him.