![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/110\/308974798_40ab821a78.jpg?resize=500%2C366\" "\\"Walter")
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There was a time when news organizations could pronounce the Conventional Wisdom of our society as a whole authoritatively. This Wisdom was not decided on by the media \u2013 but rather once it had reached a critical mass of acceptance among the media professionals, the political class, and the public at large, a news organization would close down the debate and declare it so. Before this point, various news organizations would be engaged in the battle for what was accepted as true and what was not. Pronouncing and explaining the Conventional Wisdom was the main focus of the biggest news organizations of the 1950s and 1960s. Time<\/em> magazine, the New York Times<\/em>, CBS News \u2013 all prided themselves on this. But there came moments when a news organization catalyzed opinion so suddenly, when they played a decisive role in creating the Conventional Wisdom. For example, when news organizations showed the images of the children with fire hoses turned on them \u2013 and vicious dogs \u2013 in Birmingham, the brutality of the oppression of black Americans was driven home. When Walter Cronkite declared \u201cthe bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate\u201d and that the war was \u201cunwinnable,\u201d Lyndon Johnson famously declared he had lost \u201cMiddle America.\u201d<\/p>\n Right-wingers \u2013 seeing how the media had decisively affected the course of both the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam protests by influencing the Conventional Wisdom \u2013 began a deliberate campaign to undermine the media\u2019s ability to play such a role again. They promulgated studies of media bias, promoted conservative media and commentary, opposed regulations ensuring the equal treatment of controversial subjects on public airwaves, and constantly repeated the talking points about a liberal media elite. By the 1980s, they had mainly succeeded in delegitimizing the mainstream news organizations in the eyes of conservatives, right-wingers, and Republicans \u2013 but independents and those towards the left continued to see these news organizations as legitimate.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until the late 1990s that progressives, liberals, and Democrats, began to seriously question the legitimacy of these news organizations \u2013 as the Clinton witch hunt became frenzied. Most though just saw this whole episode as tawdry. They saw it reflecting badly on both the president and the news organizations who followed each revelation with tabloid-like zeal.<\/p>\n The real turning point came in the lead-up to the Iraq war, the success of Fox News with their Orwellian slogan, \u201cWe Report, You Decide,\u201d and the election of 2004 \u2013 as Karl Rove and the Republicans attempted to influence those outside of their base with a deliberate strategy of manipulating the media. The last straw for many came in 2004 as Rove sought to discredit John Kerry by promoting the extreme allegations of a handful of Vietnam veterans who accused Kerry of faking his injuries. News organizations, wary of being branded \u201cliberal\u201d and adhering to standards of faux-objectivity, reported the story in their classic, unenlightening \u201che said, she said\u201d style. What they did not report prominently was that many of these reporters had researched these allegations and came to the conclusion that Kerry\u2019s Swift Boat attackers were wrong in their accusations. To report this truth would be to compromise their objectivity and take a side in a presidential campaign.<\/p>\n Liberals, progressives, and Democrats – seeing how these news organizations had been deliberately manipulated by Rove – began to realize the flaws in these news organizations and how they affected the public debate and the Conventional Wisdom. From this came the boom in the progressive blogosphere \u2013 some, like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post focused on reporting from a progressive perspective; others, like the Daily Kos, MoveOn, and myDD on creating an online communities for progressives.<\/p>\n By the 2008 election, both Democrats and Republicans contested the Conventional Wisdom of the mainstream news organizations constantly \u2013 and partisans on both sides developed their own communities around their own set of agreed facts and opinions \u2013 creating their own \u201cconventional wisdom.\u201d It seemed that there was only one group left trusting the legitimacy of news organizations \u2013 independents<\/a>.<\/p>\n