The decline of the New York Times: From the paper of record to "the paper for court eunuchs

Ed Driscoll:

WeinerGate versus the Summer of Nixon

And this what the MSM both dreads and can’t come to grips with: much as every aging hippie wants to recapture the halcyon days of 1967 and the “Summer of Love,” the MSM wants to recapture that golden moment in 1974, when the news consisted of three commercial TV networks, PBS, AP, Reuters, and the writers’ bullpens at the New York Times and the Washington Post.

I posted this a couple of years back:

Carroll’s golden age coincides with the rise of the one newspaper town. Why was that a good thing? How could New York be better off when the Times did not have to compete with the Herald-Tribune? Why is journalism the rare business where monopolies serve the customer better than competition?


I doubt that the reading public was or is better off. The owners were because monopolies provide a nice stream of predictable earnings. The newsroom liked that the owners were fat and happy because as long as the income statement looked good the owners did not interfere with content. Editors and reporters were free to chases awards, collect bigger paychecks, and indulge their ideological obsessions. Local monopolies also gave journalists bigger megaphones and a de facto victory in “explanation space.


The golden age, in short, rested on a temporary set of conditions in which economics and technology favored news monopolies. The readers never wanted it. That much became clear when technology began to offer more choices.

There some measure of irony at the old geezers longing for the Summer of '74. Here's David Halberstam on how the Pepsi Generation drove Nixon from office while the old bulls got left in the dust:

Guthman thought [Jackl] Nelson was the best all-round reporter he had ever seen, that he could get anyone to talk. He often wondered what would have happened if Nelson had been on the story from the beginning. He might have taken hold and he rather than Woodward and Bernstein woulld have locked up the best sources, because of the smell of it....


The smell. That was crucial. Woodward and Bernstein were new and young, and no one knew their names, they had no established sources, they had no wives or children to go home to, all they had was hunger, and they were out on the street every day visiting the homes of the people from CREEP. .... [The LA Times reporters] were established and had established sources, people whom they had learned to trust over the years. ...


Years later, reading their first book, All the President's Men, Jack Nelson felt somewhat sick, he knew immediately what had happened and why he had been beaten on the story, why the two younger reporters had been better. They had picked up on the fear...


It was for the three Times reporters very frustrating, particularly for Jack Nelson, who had never been behind on a story before. no matter how hard they worked, Woodward and Bernstein always seemed to be just one step ahead....always ahead locking up the best sources

Driscoll also quotes Andrew Klavan:

Watching Breitbart crush Weiner beneath his heel like an insignificant weiner, it occurs to me that Breitbart’s genius – and he really is an information genius – consists almost entirely of two pieces of knowledge: one, leftists will lie knowing the media will back them and two, the media will back them. With those two principles, he manages to make utter fools of both lying leftists and their corrupt mainstream media cronies

That is exactly on point. When Weiner first addressed this matter with the MSM i was struck by his overweening arrogance. He actually thought that his aggressive demeanor and clever evasions would let him put the story behind him. He was wrong, but where did he ever get the idea that he could brazen it out?