OLD MEDIA DAYS
The great Chuck Freund recalls the days of real media consolidation:
I was staring powerlessly into the black hole of media futility. But then I remembered something: My local newspaper, the very one I'd just thrown aside (the very one, as it happens, in which Shales had announced the Apocalypse), used to own a local TV station here in Washington when there were hardly any TV stations to own. In fact, it used to own the very radio station that was still droning away in the background. Indeed, it used to own one of the two-and-a-half newsweekly magazines when newsweeklies mattered. It owned all these things at the same time. I realized that, for decades, this media monster had been the gatekeeper to my brain. For me, it was too late! If media consolidation is an informational threat, then I was already its victim. Could I trust anything I thought?...[a big cut here--vp]
The usual portrait of the pre-1975 media scene is that those were the happy days before cable speeded up the news cycle and before the Internet created Drudge. Everybody listened to Uncle Cronkite at dinner, and a handful of tweedy critics could make or break a book or movie. Thoughtful editors had the luxury of carefully considering whether to run a story, and careful reporters understood that they had to pile up their sources. Politicians were articulate, network TV took journalism seriously (say, "Edward R. Murrow"), and nobody had ever thought of the concept of "infotainment." Etc.
This is a pretty familiar refrain. The short version is that American journalism's best days were spent as the midcentury gatekeeper, and that the advent of new media has turned what was once a comfortable media hierarchy into a fast-lane mess. You can't very well evoke the period as one of market dominance without undermining both the mythology and its usefulness as a truncheon against the new media. Your best option is to ignore the historical fact that the supposed golden age coincided with an era of market dominance.
Read the whole (short) thing.