BOB GARFIELD:
This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Every so often we consider words or phrases that bubble up through the media, and one locution that has lately been percolating in recent years is "mainstream media." An old term with a new political status, the supposed decline of the mainstream media is a favorite topic of Fox News. Here's Bill O'Reilly, John Gibson, regular guest pundit Laura Ingraham and Bill O'Reilly.
[AUDIO CLIPS]:
BILL O'REILLY:
A personal choice segment tonight. While many Democrats are running away from the John Kerry controversy, as we said, the mainstream media can't run. They have to report.
JOHN GIBSON:
The mask is now off. The mainstream media, typified by the big three newscasts, rooting for the Dems to win and slant coverage to make it happen.
LAURA INGRAHAM:
Well, every election cycle
[OVERLAPPING VOICES]
JOHN GIBSON:
they want to make sure --
LAURA INGRAHAM:
the dinosaur media, the old media gets more partisan than the election before. In every election cycle, I think the mainstream media's influence diminishes. And they don't seem to understand --
BILL O'REILLY:
So the anti Simpson movement, ironically, ironically, is being driven by the tabloid press -- and traditional commentators, like me. The mainstream media, well, they're watching from afar, hoping the judgmental aspect of this situation doesn't blow back on them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
In that last clip, O'Reilly ingeniously suggests that the mainstream media somehow back O.J. Simpson's recent marketing blitz. By the way, Simpson's book and TV interviews, both cancelled, were bankrolled by Fox uber boss, Rupert Murdoch. But that scenario fits into the meaning of the phrase "mainstream media" that prevails on Fox News and elsewhere, as a cauldron of amorality, out of touch with the conservative majority.

Author Bob Kahn, staunch critic of The New York Times, put it this way on The O'Reilly Factor.
BOB KAHN:
You know, the mainstream media has had a monopoly over the setting of the news agenda for over 30 years. And now with the advent of talk radio and TV cable, cable news, like the Fox News, they don't have that monopoly any more.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
In his formulation, mainstream media, or MSM, does not refer to Fox News, America's most watched cable news channel.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who authors the blog, PRESSthink.org, says the term is fatally imprecise, and he's coined his own, legacy media, like the legacy airlines.
JAY ROSEN:
Well, they resemble the legacy airlines because they are in a sense saddled with an outdated or heavy infrastructure in an age when to be nimbler and lighter might be a lot better.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You conceded in your column that the airline industry's legacy carriers have been pretty much given up for dead.
JAY ROSEN:
Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Do you forecast the same fate for the MSM?
JAY ROSEN:
No. But I think they have to realize that adapting to a new world is critical now and that certain notions [LAUGHS], certain standard practices, things they've lived with, grown up with, might, in fact, be tossed overboard.

The philosophy of objectivity and neutrality now has to be stretched over like conflicts in politics that are so deep that the one hand and the other hand reporting - he said, she said - it's like a escape from truth, rather than a measured tone of truth, a kind of a silence that journalists have practiced that others are now filling in.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We know the networks are mainstream media. We know the newspapers are mainstream media --
JAY ROSEN:
-- right --
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
-- but how about cable? Or is it everybody on the one side is mainstream media and bloggers; the citizen journalists, the independents on the other side are not the mainstream media?
JAY ROSEN:
When I use the term, I mean the professional culture of the press as it extends over a lot of different media outlets. But it depends on where you are in the media food chain, what you mean by mainstream media. That has a lot to do with it. It's a term to designate an other, and especially in blogging that's what it is; it's the other. It's what you're reacting against. It's also what you're reacting to.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It's "them."
JAY ROSEN:
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So as a word, it's essentially a moving target.
JAY ROSEN:
A floating signifier, we call it
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS]
JAY ROSEN:
in the university. Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And possibly even a product of an increasingly paranoid culture, because it seems to me that it's almost always invoked as a pejorative.
JAY ROSEN:
Associations with cluelessness do cling to this term.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Cluelessness, but also extreme capitulation on the left or the right. I mean, when Bill O'Reilly refers to it, he talks about a liberal media establishment that's not only out of touch but pernicious. And when people on the left talk about it, they talk about one that is wholly owned by corporate interests and the right and is antithetical to the goals of democracy.
JAY ROSEN:
You know, Brooke, [LAUGHS] as we're talking about this, it's occurring to me that part of why this term "mainstream media" came about is that so a lot of different people could say what was ending.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS]
JAY ROSEN:
The world of the mainstream media began unraveling in the mid seventies when cable television began to enter American life, and this limited range of choices started to expand dramatically. And your Internet came along and took all of those people who for so long had been the audience [LAUGHS] of the media and connected them to one another.

For the year 2004, for people on the cultural and political right, the red state of America [LAUGHS], MSM was a very concrete, real, almost sensuous thing. It was not at all an abstraction. And I think people are going to remember 2004 and the politics of that year partially with those initials MSM.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
New York University professor Jay Rosen authors the blog PRESSthink.org.