"Cold Civil War ... of Media"
Carl Bernstein, CNN’s Reliable Sources Sunday morning, they were talking about the Russia investigation and the media. Bernstein is of Woodward and Bernstein Watergate fame, the Washington Post.
BERNSTEIN: We are in the midst of a cold civil war in this country, a political and cultural civil war, and all of our reporting is taking place in the context of that cold civil war. And nothing quite like that existed at the time of Watergate. And that part of the cold civil war itself is the configuration of media with Fox News, with CNN being perceived by different sets of viewers as representing different truths. Our politics has been changed inalterably by this right-wing counterforce. It is a different media universe, and it’s a cauldron taking place in this hothouse of political debate in which a fact-based debate is becoming impossible in this culture, and that’s part of the difficulty here. RUSH: Translation: We’ve lost our monopoly! Now there’s other people out there contradicting what we say and we don’t know how to deal with it and so we have a media civil war, too. Imagine these poor people. Put yourself in their shoes, the media. And prior to 1988 they owned it. Think of the power. Think of the cognizant, the realization every day of the power they have. They and they alone determined what the American people were told. They and they alone determined what the American people were not told. They and they alone determined who would be given puff pieces and who would be destroyed in the media. They and they alone determined the commentary, who would be allowed to say what about these so-called facts. But since 1988 and then the second wave in the mid- to late nineties, 1996 with Fox News, that monopoly is gone. And now, because they were not reporting the facts, because they were not reporting everything, and because they were so off balance in favor of one side, it’s the market that made alternative media viable. It’s nothing else. They want to blame it on powerful, rich, wealthy donors and businessmen and industrialists creating talk radio and Fox News. It’s the market. The Drive-By Media and their monopoly openly mocked at least half the country. Daily they made fun of them, they disregarded them, they disrespected them. And when alternatives were presented, that half of the country fled and left the mainstream media in its wake. The market dictated all this, Mr. Bernstein, not some invisible, powerful force over which you in the media had no control. You had total control over this.
More From Rush Limbaugh:
