Media Meltdown Update

The other day I posted about the meltdown in print and broadcast media. I said this at the time:

With falling newspaper sales, declining viewership, the take down of Dan Rather and Eason Jordon, it is little wonder that legacy media are launching an all out assault on bloggers. Bloggers have the ultimate weapon with which to fight back and ironically that same weapon is available to legacy media. It's called the truth.

Seems The Editor and Publisher agrees.

Readership and audiences of the mainstream media are dropping like a stone, but the reporting by the mainstream media on Rathergate and Easongate give little sign that anyone understands why. CJR Daily managing editor Steve Lovelady gave a pretty accurate consensus of the mainstream media's view of what the real problem was: the bloggers did it! Rather and Jordan went down, he said, because: "The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail."

If it takes “salivating morons” to get major news organizations to clean up their acts and remember Journalism 101, may they slobber on -- before the American people stop paying any attention to big media at all. In the end, as The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz points out, Jordan only resigned “following a relentless campaign by online critics but scant coverage in the mainstream press.” Those of us in mainstream media had better ask why we didn’t do a better job ourselves.

A few others in major news organizations are starting to voice their concerns about big media's failing the public.

How bad are things? Well, CBS News Senior Foreign Correspondent Tom Fenton says, "We know we could have saved thousands of lives if we had done more to bring the public's attention to the threat of an Al-Qaeda attack in the years before 9/11. What we must ask now is why did we fail?"

But will the big wigs at the top wake up before it's too late?
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