Matt Drudge is interpreting CBS’s welcome decision to punt on its anti-Reagan biopic as “the beginning of a second media century.” Terry Teachout concurs:
Of course it’s a new-media story, and of course it wouldn’t have happened five years ago. I’ve been following Big Media’s coverage of the flap over The Reagans, and just two days ago I noted with interest and amusement a wire story claiming that CBS would be pleased by the controversy, since it would inevitably increase the series’ ratings. That is soooooo last year. Those of us who blog, whatever our political persuasions, know better. Boycotts of Big Media have always been feasible in theory. (Newspapers, in case you didn’t know, take cancel-my-subscription-you-bastards letters very seriously-if they get enough of them.) In practice, though, they rarely worked, because it was too difficult to mobilize large-scale support quickly enough. No more. Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative-libertarian sector of the blogosphere have combined to create a giant megaphone through which disaffected right-wing consumers who have a bone to pick with Big Media can now make themselves heard.
One way of testing this is to see whether Jim Romenesko followed the story – a good indicator of whether it really is damaging to the media liberal establishment. He ignored it, buttressing Drudge’s and Teachout’s case. I take all of Matt’s and Terry’s points. But, from all the excerpts Drudge has exposed, this biopic seems to me to be almost one of a kind. It was so egregiously designed to attack a beloved president in his waning years, so riddled with obvious lies and distortions, so hateful in its intent, that I doubt any major network would have gotten away with it in any time. Even Leslie Moonves, the Castro-loving lefty who runs CBS, was forced to concede: “It’s biased.” Can you imagine how bad it is if even Moonves sees through it? In some ways, I think Drudge has inadvertently rescued CBS. If the miniseries had run, the backlash would have been so great, the exposure of the poisonous bias in parts of CBS so final, it might have helped destroy the already-flailing old media network. So the new media saved the old media. That in itself, of course, is a major story. And Drudge deserves credit for reporting it. Yes, reporting it. Why do the old media never give him credit when he does journalism as well as any of them?
The Dish 