Call it “crashing the gate” 3.0, the media version, with due respect to the original coiners of that phrase.
But we’re in it now. Just recently I was talking about old media v. new media, but it seems the dynamics between what is passing away and what is taking its place has broken out into the open. And it’s all because of a most unlikely ally: Barack Obama. After all, it’s not like candidate Obama, or as president, he has championed new media.
That battle between the “serious” journalists who “toil daily,” you know, like Dana Milbank (pictured above), as opposed to new media who works 24/7. The New York Times’s Kate Phillips has a beauty of a column on the earthquake today, even though new media outlet Politico, founded by old media men, helped start this pie fight. The bold below revealing old media entitlement arrogance in a nutshell.
While that may indeed be a thorn in the feet of the corps who toil daily, the perception of a favored one who got exceptionally advance notice may send signals — far and wide — as to what lengths the administration will go to stage and control the message the president wants to send.
That is what has gotten lost in all the old vs. new media antagonisms. It’s not about Mr. Pitney’s work or for that matter, the question he asked. It’s about how the administration finagled the position in which he became an actor for the president’s agenda.
How else will new media break in to the closed group that deems itself the only ones who “toil” if not by invitation?
What old media is seeing, starting when Sam Stein was called on at another Obama press conference, is their dominance on access and hierarchy smashed to smithereens and they’re not taking it all that well.
They’re envisioning their umbrella of health insurance, paid vacation, retirement, etc., disappearing, which is what old media is worried about at its core. Losing the cushy pad from which they pontificate, something new media has never had.
They also can’t admit that new media has earned our spot.
There is also no evidence whatsoever that Pitney coordinated the exact question with the White House. In fact, Obama didn’t even answer his question, actually making Pitney part of the group who gets double speak, too. Never mind that it was the hardest question asked that day.
President Obama invited a reporter from new media giant Huffington Post to ask a question from an Iranian citizen that ended up relegating old media to the outsiders looking in. A question that old media didn’t have, because they don’t have the access.
This isn’t J.F.K.’s press corps anymore. New media has crashed the gate and it’s every man and woman for themselves.
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