Rich Lowry: New(est) Media Whore

I saw this yesterday at Hot Air and was going to let it pass, but I see it's come up in a few places today.

Jules:

Rick Lowry at the National Review has a thoughtful column on the limits of media bashing. He makes some very good points regarding some specific cases and criticisms. He is talking about trees, and a couple of thickets. What he misses is the forest. The pervasive underlying assumptions and perspective that taint many Associated Press reports and those in other major newspapers and broadcasts.

CQ:

I suspect that Lowry has it more right than many of us in the blogosphere would like to admit. Certainly the media has its biases, but it simply cannot be as wrong as many of us would like to believe. Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets undermine their own credibility when they continue to insist that obvious examples of egregious malfeasance, such as Rathergate and the Eason Jordan scandals, never occurred.

I hate making enemies around here, but I always try to write what I feel. Frankly, Yglesias (linked at top) has it about right:

National Review editor Rich Lowry must be drinking the Beltway kool-aid or angling for a gig on The New York Times op-ed page because here he is selling out to the traitors in the MSM:

Lowry and some other notable new media conservative pundits have been tending to moderate their positions in more ways than one. I think it, perhaps unconsciously, has more to do with sniffing the big bucks that genuinely big media brings and looking for their shot at that particular brass ring. Some bloggers appear to be moving that way, as well - especially when they start informing other bloggers of the truth in some allegedly higher moral tone. And some seem to be doing it more and more.

Could it be having had the good fortune to nibble around the edges of the media pie, they're now looking to grab a larger slice? I don't question their honesty, seriousness, or thoughtfulness, really. I don't see it so much as a deliberate strategy, as I do an instance of having been seduced.

It's wonderful to think about bigger pay checks and bylines because you have arrived by demonstrating your maturity as a writer / thinker and your ability to play nice. But my immediate thought is that you're one step closer to becoming precisely that which you set out to oppose.

As an aside, I should also credit Michelle Malkin for holding onto her convictions while at the same time blurring the lines between new media and old. She isn't someone I'm thinking about while writing this.

I just hope that while we barbarians are really only now just beginning to crash the gate ... some few who opt to slip inside the walls and give aid and comfort to the enemy don't end up undermining the entire cause.

From Rathergate, to fauxtography, Qana, the win over E&P hack Greg Mitchell, to perhaps Jamil Hussein and other scores, we are just beginning to hold big media to account. The goal in the end isn't to destroy it, it's to make it better. And it seems a little too early in the fight to simply start swelling their ranks, or echoing their prose.

Given the lay of the land, it'll end up just as it did when we sent reformist Republicans to Washington and ended up 12 years later with just more of the same. The beast is a little too big to be internally influenced right now.

I'm about holding its feet to the fire and sticking in a few more spears as the opposition before thinking it's time to cut and run, or get folded inside - too much of that right now and we risk having the tremendous early efforts of blogs and new media undone.

Comments

[Phoenix]

That's fine, Dan. Whoever cops off this juggernaut of information and accountability sets himself up to become one of its targets. The best is yet to come.

[Charles Warren]

The last thing the right needs is a 'backstab myth' about how we would have 'won' in Iraq (i.e. turned authoritarian religious fanatics into libertarians) except for the MSM not rallying the country behind Bush (as if that were their job).