Don't miss Daniel Henninger “2004's Biggest Losers: How Dan Rather and the Media's Kings Lost Their Crowns:
. . . Big Media lost big. But it was more than a loss. It was an abdication of authority.
Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did so by choosing to go into overt opposition to one party's candidate, a sitting president. It stooped to conquer.
. . . Authority can be a function of raw power, but among free people it is sustained by esteem and trust. Should esteem and trust falter, the public will start to contest an institution's authority. It happens all the time to political figures. It happened here to the American Catholic Church and to the legal profession, thanks to plaintiff-bar abuse. And now the public is beginning to contest the decades-old authority of the mainstream media. . . .
. . . This was the election that brought the reality of the Information Age to politics, not just the promise. . . .
I'm not suggesting that Big Media has lost power. Anyone who can package and drive a particularized version of the news on that scale can move opinion, as clearly happened with Iraq the past six months. But these institutions are no longer viewed as authority figures as in the past; now they're just teams in the pro political league, like everyone else.
