The Emmy Awards appear to have been old home week for the MSM (the mainstream media). As Inkwell has previously noted, Hurricane Katrina, a story that requires lots of cash and heavy equipment bloggers don’t possess, breathed new–and let’s hope temporary–life into the MSM.
In a piece headlined (I kid you not) “Heroes Behind the Cameras,” Eugene Robinson celebrates the ill wind that blew the elite media a favor:
“You wouldn’t think that the longest ovation at the Emmy Awards, an annual celebration of trendiness, would go to three such trend-averse men — Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, who stood awkwardly on stage, and the late Peter Jennings, whose image appeared behind them on a giant monitor. But the audience rose and clapped in one of the dreary telecast’s few moments of genuine electricity, and the tribute made sense coming so soon after the latest reminder of television’s power not only to describe the world but to shape it as well.
“I’m a print-media guy to the bone, but I have to give props to the way my colleagues in television have covered Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. (Note to Tom and Dan: ‘Props’ is a good thing.) [Note to Gene: You are too cool.] Television rose to become a force for good instead of a force for the evil of happy-faced oversimplification, to which the medium so frequently succumbs.”
I have previously suggested that Iraq is another story that the MSM can dominate. Predictably, Robinson wants the MSM to focus its “rediscovered aggressiveness” on Iraq.