My phones have been unusually busy lately with calls from major media.
It started just in the last week or so.
It’s not that major media didn’t reference me and my news organization frequently. It’s just that previously they didn’t feel the necessity of actually speaking to me before writing or broadcasting.
I guess they figured that would be like calling Hitler for his opinion about invading Poland.
Anyway, that’s all changed. Today, they’re calling.
Why?
Well, I suspect there is something of an awakening taking place in the Old Media. The tea parties, the town halls, the big Washington rally and the major stories they are forced to catch up on have all helped to give them a clue.
Some of the top editors and producers are actually telling their reporters it’s time to plug into other points of view.
Take Washington Post Editor Marcus Brauchli, for example. He is openly and publicly worrying “that we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It’s particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view.”
He says he is now challenging his reporters and editors to look at what is going on across the political spectrum – “at the extremes, among the rabble rousers, as well as among policymakers.”
I guess that’s why I got a call this week from the Washington Post.
I’m only guessing because, at the time of this writing, I haven’t returned the call from the reporter yet. Been too busy breaking news to fill in the competition on what’s going on.
It’s bugging the Post that readers are beginning to feel like they can’t get the news in a timely way by turning to the paper. There wasn’t a word about “green jobs” czar Van Jones until he had been forced to issue two public apologies and was chased from office mainly by the reporting of my little news agency. WND last April broke the first of more than 20 investigative reports that led eventually to his downfall.
The Post also did not report the astonishing ACORN undercover video reports by a pair of young journalists until two days after the first one was aired.
But not everyone is thrilled with this new sensitivity to actual news broken outside the so-called “mainstream” media gates.
The Columbia Journalism Review is apoplectic about the development. The latest issue includes an interview with one of the gatekeepers, Rick Perlstein, described as “a liberal historian of the conservative movement.”
“I read what Brauchli said, and what he was paraphrased as saying, and it almost suggests to me that Matt Drudge is becoming his assignment editor,” said Perlstein. “I mean, why would a newspaper like the Post be training its investigative focus on ACORN now? Whether you think well or ill of ACORN, they’re a very marginal group in the grand scheme of things – and about as tied to the White House as the PTA.”
A marginal group? One that is funded by taxpayers to the tune of tens of millions from the federal government alone, not to mention the $8.5 billion it was in line to get in stimulus funds? One that was officially involved in conducting the Census? One that formerly hired the president as an attorney? One that formerly hired him to train its activists?
I guess Perlstein has a slightly different definition of the word “marginal” than I do.
All I can say is the Old Media better beware.
They should remember their bottom line.
If they start reporting on government fraud, waste, abuse and corruption the way we do, they just might not get that federal bailout some of them are counting on.
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Wayne Allyn Root