Evan Thomas’s 15 Points of Hubris
Mr. Thomas of Newsweek said this, on Inside Washington, about John Kerry’s support:
There’s one other base here, the media. Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox. They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there’s going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.
What is this man thinking? The network news audience was 60 million in 1980, 30 million a few years ago, and is still shrinking year after year. The New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post have all seen their circulations cut by 10-15% over the last decade, to 0.8-1.2 million.
By contrast, Rush Limbaugh has over twenty million listeners a week, and the industry he has created may have twice that, as a guess. And the blogosphere is in a period of exponential (I almost wrote “existential” — which may be correct as well) growth, with Instapundit, for example now at over 260,000 daily page views. It only broke 100,000 two years ago, data via blogads.
Newsweek’s circulation has been stagnant, by the way, though I don’t have the current absolute figure. In any event, there is a big difference between having Peter Jennings on in the background or having a magazine on the coffee table, and the active listening or reading done in the growing venues of talk radio and the blogosphere.
As Glenn Reynolds and the Belmont Club observe, mediators of truth like Mr. Thomas have been cut out of the picture.