Of boycotts and the news

Boycotts only work when everyone (or nearly everyone) complies with them. Once people start cheating, boycotts typically fall apart.

This principle applies to the news business as well. But the legacy media (also referred to as the mainstream media and old media) do not understand this. The major dailies and the networks ignored the Van Jones story for weeks until his midnight resignation forced them to report on it. Van Jones, of course, was forced to resign as the green jobs czar after cable news and talk radio aired some of the inane and occasionally-racist statements he made. The revelation that he was a truther was the final straw. The legacy media, however, was AWOL until the bitter end.

Now the legacy media is studiously ignoring Climategate. As Bret Stephens explains in his Wall Street Journal article:

"Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU."

Climategate is a huge story that is not simply going to fade away, especially with Copenhagen looming on the horizon. Yet the legacy media (with the obvious exception of the Wall Street Journal) has shown scant interest in it. I have not seen a single story about it in our local paper, the Houston Chronicle. That paper, however, does continue to blithely parrot the dire warnings of the very scientists whose objectivity is now being questioned.

When Abe Rosenthal was the editor of the New York Times, he liked to refer to himself as the "gatekeeper." The decision-makers at many of the major dailies and the television networks still seem to regard themselves as filling that role. What they don't realize is that talk radio, cable news, and the Internet have already filled the vacuum that they are trying to maintain.

No wonder the legacy media is withering on the vine.