Charlie Reese made an important observation in his recent editorial “Fate of Newspapers”.  According to Charlie: “newspapers are in decline”.  However, he is wrong in claiming this decline is caused by a dearth of reading desire/skills among modern Americans.  The decline is felt not only among newspapers, but mainstream television news sources: ABC, NBC, CBS, etc. American reading is not the problem.  In fact the number of readers at various Internet sites is expanding exponentially.  Americans are reading more, but they are choosing different, non-traditional venues.  In visual media, Non-mainstream Fox News has grown from nothing to become the leading cable and television news source.  In this shift, Americans have broken the monopoly of network news and brought about decline in mainstream visual media.  The big question: What has caused the decline of mainstream news and rise of alternative sources?

 

 To put it simply, most people that work in American mainstream media are part of an “elite” culture that is grossly out of touch with the average American.  They are far more secularist and Liberal than the average American.  Poll after poll has shown that reporters and TV anchormen vote for Democratic candidates in vastly disproportionate numbers to American voting.  The number of “born-again” or conservative Christians among the staff of mainstream news outlets is a tiny fraction of the percentage in America.  The number of atheists and agnostics is far higher.  Those who are pro-abortion dwarf the tiny percentage of pro-lifers.  The indicators of the media’s Liberal/secularist slant goes on and on.

 

A result of mainstream media “elitism” is that news becomes unconsciously slanted to fit the Liberal/secularist worldview.  This can be seen with the types of stories picked for top coverage and the manner in which they are covered. 

 

Bill Connor