The Left is Losing the Media Wars

The leftist media overstructure -- the network of committed individuals and institutions that keep the media narrative congruent with the goals of the left -- is starting to self-destruct, devouring itself with headstrong recklessness, ego, and inability to understand the strength of conservatives and their ideas.

The left is taking serious casualties in the Zimmerman affair. Two lefty media operatives lost their jobs, we learned late Friday afternoon. Heads are rolling in the wake of failed attempts to politicize the death of Trayvon Martin. At NBC, a producer has been fired.  And now Media Matters senior analyst M.J. Rosenberg, having humiliated the organization, is leaving the Soros-funded media bully outfit.

Foxnews.com reports:

MJ Rosenberg, who also got into hot water for mistakenly accusing the Drudge Report website of racism in coverage of the Trayvon Martin case, announced Friday on the Media Matters website that he was "striking out on my own with a brand new website and blog."

"My presence here is being used in an effort to shut Media Matters up," Rosenberg said in announcing he will be creating a new site, MJayRosenberg.com.

Both announcements were timed to be buried during a big holiday weekend, in a futile attempt to limit the damage to NBC and MMFA.  See Rick Moran's account today of NBC's bungled attempt to evade responsible for a deliberate political hit here. They have a lot at stake, including a potential lawsuit for defamation, in an indefensible edit being accidental, despite layers of checking and counter-checking built into their editorial structure.

Add in the departure of Keith Olbermann from Current TV, which has degenerated to a mud-slinging contest and countersuits that is sliming the reputations of all concerned, including Al Gore, and it has been one of the worst weeks ever for the leftist media establishment.  

If we start keeping score a couple of weeks ago, the Media Wars Score is Conservatives 3, Leftists 0. Recall that the left launched a campaign to get talk radio king Rush Limbaugh off the air, and intimidate advertisers into dropping him. Leftists generally think of themselves as smarter than all the rest of us, übermenschen, supermen, if you will. Well, unfortunately for them, Rush is made of kryptonite. The advertisers who deserted him have suffered grievous harm at the hands of angry former customers who patronized them because of their connection to Rush. When they sided with Media Matters, they became enemies.

If you are trying to bully people and don't resort to violence, it is not a good thing to have it be known that the dumbest thing anyone can do is pay attention to you.

Rush is not the only conservative made of kryptonite either. John Sexton of Big Journalism:

Brian Stelter of The New York Times credits NewsBusters.org for being the first to catch NBC's edit. He provides a link to this NewsBusters post dated March 30. However, the NewsBusters story is actually based on, and links back to, a story published here at Breitbart.com two days earlier. In that story, author Dan Riehl highlighted the edit to the Zimmerman 911 tape as it appeared in print at MSNBC. The MSNBC story was originally published March 21st, six days before the same edit was used in the Today show broadcast.

Yesterday, a Reuters story credited both Breitbart.com and NewsBusters for bringing the problem to the attention of NBC executives.

It is likely that, if not for conservative new media, the misleading edit, which inflamed racial tensions in the Martin case, and which was repeated by Stetler's own New York Times, would have gone unnoticed and uncorrected. As it is, the producer responsible for the edit at Today has been fired, but the individual who made the same edit to the earlier MSNBC story (since corrected) has not been identified or disciplined. Nor has anyone at any other outlet or network -- many of which made similar selective editing choices -- been punished.

The questions are only just beginning on Editgate.

He's right. Power is shifting in the media landscape, and old strategies that reliably worked for the left no longer are effective, and often blow up in their faces.