Media hatred isn't new.

This is a really interesting post.

But the right wing talk brigade doesn't exist just to build up their own or tear down Democrats. They have, from the moment they first rolled onto the air, existed to tell you that traditional news organizations are no good. The Washington Post? Inside the beltway losers out of touch with real America. CNN? The Clinton News Network. The New York Times? Please. Do you really have to ask?

Punditry has always aimed as much artillery at the people who deliver the news as it does at those who make it. There's a very good reason for this. Before you can convince someone of a lie, you need to make it more difficult for them to check your information. If you establish from the start that NPR is communist, MSNBC and CNN are slanted, and every newspaper this side of Journal's editorial page should be printed on pink paper, then any exaggeration you deliver becomes the de facto standard. Impugning the validity of other news sources is the first job of a successful pundit. They don't seek to be your sources of information by passing along reliable news. They do so by constantly assailing the legitimacy of other sources until you're left shaking your head at the absolute ignorance of everyone but Rush/Bill/Sean/Ann.

...

The myth of the "liberal media" came long before the blogs. Discrediting the "nattering nabobs" of the press is not a game that originated with bloggers. Every blogger I know is fully aware that we could not survive without the legwork done by hardworking, professional reporters. Bloggers are not competition to the traditional media -- though they do, hopefully, act as an occasional check on its excesses. However, even if the Internet were entirely dedicated to the downfall of existing media, it would be only one popgun in a chorus of cannons. A large part of the traditional media is dedicated to nothing less than making war on the rest.

Suffering the wounds from that war, the media might have chosen to hold to strict standards and fought back by dissecting the falsehoods being directed against good reporting. Instead, that job has been left, almost without exception, to the very bloggers Keen blames as the cause. The reaction of the traditional media was quite different.

In response to the assault from less factual sources, media both accelerated the already existing trend toward mingling news and entertainment and -- in the most twisted move imaginable -- sought to imitate the mudslingers. They joined the war not by upholding their standards, but by dismissing them. And again, they did so for the reason that Keen indicates as the break between amateur and professional: the perception that there was more money to be made on the less truthful side of the aisle.

It's a good point, I think, that blogs are not new in that regard. But how do we reestablish that facts are indeed important and reshape the news? Glenn Greenwald, in this interview, suggests mudslinging MAD:

The point isn't to start lowering oneself to that level and copying the worst parts of the Right's behavior. The point is to neutralize what they do so that it's no longer one-sided. If one country possesses nuclear weapons, a rival country wants to obtain them not to use them, but to render their use irrational, impossible. That's what Democrats and liberals must start doing with these election rituals.

Maybe that's the answer. But, as they suggest about Iran, I'm not sure the Right is rational enough for MAD to work as a deterrent. We probably need regulation of what qualifies as press, as I've suggested in the past (last few paragraphs, post-rant).