Is Bad News the Only News? Take Heart.

Tom Bevan, Executive Editor of the must read RealClearPolitics website, the best and deservedly influential aggregator of opinion and polling on the Internet, himself has a must read this morning: “Bad News Is The Only News.”

A brief excerpt, but read the whole post:

Video footage of the flaming wreckage of a car bomb in Baghdad beamed into living rooms across the nation at night -after being played in a loop throughout the day on cable - has a far greater influence on the national psyche than a hundred stories detailing the positive side of things in Iraq.

Let me reiterate this has little to do with ideology (you'll see footage of the flaming car bomb wreckage on every network and cable news channel - though the emphasis of the coverage may vary) but is instead driven by the media's inherent bias toward chaos and bad news. The saying "if it bleeds, it leads" is just as true in Baghdad as it is in your hometown, and the result is that terrorists have now gained a tremendous advantage.

Terrorists have benefited greatly from a variety of aspects of the advancing technology era: cell phones and Internet chat rooms to help coordinate plans and logistics; wire transfers to move money at a moment's notice; web sites to spread the hate and the techniques of violent jihad. One could argue, however, that the greatest asset terrorists have acquired in the past half-decade is the skill to manipulate a global mass media that broadcasts in real-time with high-definition clarity.

I must add a more optimistic note.

For those of us awakened by Barry Goldwater and motivated to the long march from the depths of 1964 to Ronald Reagan and George Bush, there is an understanding that tides do and, indeed, can be turned through resolute dedication to sound ideals and careful organizing.

Believe it or not, I predict the tide will also turn and be turned in the American media by the wide-spread awakening from the bad news fixation and increasingly partisan toward Democrat memes of the mainstream media.

It’s already happening. Witness the influence of more centrist-right Fox News, of bloggers, of MSM venues allowing more access from conservatives while its old stars flail about more noticeably in leftist fits of frustration and expose their bias in shoddy hit pieces. John Kerry was defeated by the awakening new journalism, after all, as he admitted in flailing at it right after the election.

The new journalism will increasingly provide the resources and the speed of more accurately reporting the bad news and to include the good news that neither the U.S. Government is capable of nor the old media is interested in providing as it chases milking-the-profits cow business technique of shrinking infrastructure.

Take heart good soldiers of truth, and keep marching.