Limbaugh and the New Media

Limbaugh and the New Media - The Rolling Stones "jumped the shark", as far as I'm concerned, when their lifestyles became a bigger story than their music. It was subtle, but somewhere between 1975 and 1980 the Stones became more important as celebrities than as musicians. In short - they became just too plain big.

It could be said the New York Times jumped the shark this past year - although we'll need some years to know for sure. Still the signs are ominous for the standard bearer of the old media. Over the weekend, Powerline on the the NYTimes's having to correct its obit of Edward Said:

"Earlier this week the Times belatedly admitted having been suckered once again--how many times is that?--by the bald-faced lies of a leftist:

'An obituary on Friday about Edward W. Said, the Columbia University literary scholar and advocate of a Palestinian state, misidentified the city that was his childhood home and misstated the date of Jerusalem's partition into Jewish and Arab areas. Although Mr. Said was born in Jerusalem, in 1935, his family's home was Cairo; they did not move from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was partitioned in 1949, not 1947.'"

The NYTimes has been caught in a lot of these things since the emergence of the blogosphere: Andrew Sullivan's famed dissections of Paul Krugman (who's become ever-more desperate and irrelevant since then); the blog-centered underground of samizdat news coming from Iraq before the war, and now Iran; the toppling of Jayson Blair (and then Howell Raines), which started among the blogs; the gradual growth in the "US Successes in Iraq" story in the past month or so. I think a case can be made that all are comments on the growing power - and credibility - of the blogosphere.

And who are the last people to be in on the story? The major media. The Times.

I bring this up because of the Rush Limbaugh flap. You've all heard the story; the muted head-shakings of Limbaugh's conservative base, the gleeful whooping of his detractors who are happy for no reason more than they sense a "payback" for the Clinton years, and suddenly feel there's genuine moral equivalence, although they're wrong. Lileks said it well:

my gut says guilty. I am also sure that upon hearing the news, Al Franken spronged sufficient wood to knock the table over. In terms of his credibility with his followers, I think Rush just had his Aimee Semple McPherson moment. The faithful will be divided. Short term? His 4Q ratings book is going to rock.

I have had deeply mixed feelings about Limbaugh for fifteen years. His version of conservatism is one sired by convenience as much as by Hayek and Goldwater. And his entry into the syndie market helped screw my nascent talk radio career in the late eighties, when a lot of stations that used to hire 24 year old kids to work their mid-day shifts suddently discovered they could get Limbaugh, a national show, for free via satellite. In a matter of a few years, Limbaugh slashed the guts out of the market for entry-level talk show hosts.

And yet, beyond the sheer joy of watching the apoplexy Limbaugh gives to fundamentalist liberals, Limbaugh's important for a couple of reasons; he's a transitional figure for the new media, and he might be the first of the transitional figures to flame out.

Before Limbaugh, talk radio was:

• Controlled by the same people that controlled the major networks; ABC TalkRadio, NBC TalkNet, Mutual
• Really dull
• dominated a hierarchical system where scores of local hosts tried to scramble their way up the organization to a job with one of the big networks - who were the only real gateways to wider audiences.

Limbaugh changed that, ushering in the private syndication deals that dominate so much of radio today. The talk radio market started democratizingitself overnight.

There are parallels.

At the dawn of the computer era, a few large corporations and universities dominated the computer industry. They had to - nobody else could build or program them! And so from the late 1940's to the late 1970's, companies like IBM, Univac, Sperry, Burroughs and other giants built all the computers, big mainframe behemoths that needed to have buildings (or at least large complexes of rooms) built around them, and cost an arm and a leg to run. The big companies lived large - and developed the bad habits of the people who did that sort of thing.

Then, in the early eighties, the personal computer began distributing the power of the big mainframe computer - and eventually, the network that had linked the big computers together. It revolutionized the way data was gathered, refined and processed.

Maybe the media are starting to see the same thing; for centuries, the press was free, as long as you owned a press, or a transmitter or network of broadcast operations. And big media developed all the habits - institutionalized arrogance, inbred excess - that had plagued Big Computing, Big Steel, Big Mining before all were overtaken by their more agile competitors. Watching Dan Rather reading the evening news reminds me of watching Keith Richard, bloated and wacked out of his mind, being led out of a courtroom after one of his many drug trials, awash in dissipation, teetering on the brink between relevance and the Classic Rock circuit. It's the look of a person (or in this case an industry) at its peak, with noplace to go but down.

Today, the internet makes everyone a publisher. A small, lean, frazzled publisher to be sure, but a good blogger can put out an excellent niche product, the same way a good open-source programmer can make a contribution on their home PC far out of proportion to what his uncle could have done from his workstation hooked up to a network mainframe 30 years ago.

So Limbaugh made the institution of the creaky old talk networks obsolete - and took a big gouge out of the edge of the liberal media oligarchy they belonged to. In doing so, he became an institution himself, with all the entropy that goes along with becoming a monolith in a competitive society.

Perhaps something growing among us today will one day send the big, top-down syndication system the way of the dinosaurs, too. Will it be the blogosphere? Smaller, more regional syndication deals? Internet radio?

Limbaugh's alleged drug habit is a personal tragedy - and in a larger sense, maybe a sign that the world of the media (or the alternative media) is evolving.

Posted by Mitch at October 7, 2003 06:04 AM