I can vividly recall the start of my rejection of mainstream media news the move from purely watching and reading news towards the use of online blogs. I was in college at the The George Washington University waiting up in the front of the line for the political show, Crossfire. It was a fun show at the time of “the left” vs. “the right” that GWU had just gotten exclusive rights to have on the campus to host just before an election season. I wanted to talk about President Bush removing the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as I had opposed him doing so at the time, but the coordinators behind the scene wanted to limit what people wanted to ask and even told the commentators on stage in advance what the question would be. Obviously this riled me up and jaded me enough to begin to see the downsides of how the MSM was behaving. Afterwards a few college friends introduced me to a few blogs and from there I began to develop a sense of the problems developing within the MSM.

Once the MSM started to open up and only care about profits, it was only a matter of time that an acute businessman like Murdoch would see the niches in the market and launch Fox News into a network that catered solely to the Republicans, what has surprised me is how long it has taken one of the other networks to finally delve towards the Democrats. Shaun Mullen over at The Moderate Voice finds an interesting story about MSM ideological positioning by Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times:

[A] story by Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times caught my attention because of his contention that CNN’s embrace of hyperbole in this presidential campaign season is not merely bad journalism, but a coldly calculated effort to position itself ideologically the way that Fox and MSNBC have.

In fact, writes Rutten:

“We now have a situation in which the three all-news cable networks each have aligned themselves with a point on the political compass: Fox went first and consciously became the Republican network; MSNBC, which would have sold its soul to the devil for six ratings points, instead found a less-demanding buyer in the Democrats. Now, CNN has decided to reinvent itself as the independent, populist network cursing both sides of the conventional political aisle — along with immigrants and free trade, of course.

“In other words, for the first time since the advent of television news as a major force in American life, the 2008 presidential campaign will be fought out with individual networks committed to particular political perspectives. Why does that matter? As far back as 2004, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that ‘cable now trails only local TV news as a regular source for (presidential) campaign information. In several key demographic categories — young people, college graduates and wealthy Americans — cable is the leading source for election news.’ Thus, for key segments of the electorate — groups rich in what the pollsters call ‘likely voters’ — the main source of political news is now a partisan, or at least, a politicized one.”

My only point with the difference is that CNN is not going towards an independent populist route, but rather the protectionist & isolationist position to fill up one of the two remaining niches not covered by MSNBC or Fox News (the last one left to fill would be the libertarian position).

These kind of shows are already split within Europe for many of the news outlets and I personally find it to be a detriment to good politics and an informed citizenry, but with that said, not absolutely detrimental to democracy as a whole, just unfortunately one that is sub-par in my opinion.