Legal Commentary

The Death Throes Of The Traditional Media

By Big Tent Democrat

Via DougJ, I read this Politico piece on the decline of Newsweek editor Jon Meacham's star:

Jon Meacham has had the kind of charmed professional life that other journalists can only envy: Newsweek managing editor at 29, editor at 37; author of four books, the latest, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” awarded the Pulitzer Prize last year in biography. So it was not without a certain schadenfreude that the media world seemed to take special relish in what turned out to be what his friend Sally Quinn called “a week from hell,” for Meacham some days short of his 41st birthday.

Personally, I never cared for Meacham's work, but he is not much worse or better than the rest of the Media. Pompous and tedious? Sure. But so is George Will. But I was struck by the silly reaction of Howard Fineman (admittedly an employee of Meacham's):

"His rise was meteoric and nothing is easy," says Howard Fineman, Newsweek’s chief political writer. "He's studied leadership and he knows that people like Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson had tough times, too. It's not all gravy."

Say what? Meacham's pedestrian and uninteresting failure at Newsweek is comparable to the leadership challenges faced by Churchill and FDR? My gawd, Fineman. What an embarrassing thing to say.

The funny thing is Meacham will land somewhere and preside over the decline of some other Media entity, and then another one after that and so on. He's got a decade yet to go before he becomes a Fox analyst. Fineman will be ok too. I predict Politico in his future within a year.

The real moral of this story is no one outside of the Beltway cocktail party circuit cares about this. Newsweek, like network news, and most of the rest of the Media are quickly sliding to irrelevance.

For all the teeth gnashing over the financial viability of the Traditional Media, I wonder if they think about the fact that their relevance is in even worse shape than their financial statements.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on May 16, 2010 (boomark / email).