If some reformer is looking for a worthy project, how about restoring the teaching of Latin to our public schools? Then Americans might know that “media” is the plural of “medium” and not a singular noun. Thus we would be spared such solecisms as “The biased liberal media is ignoring all the good news from Iraq.”
Granted, most modern dictionaries no longer label this usage as “illiterate,” but treating “media” as a singular is especially inaccurate these days, given the variety of media we now enjoy.
We can start with “biased liberal media.” I’ve finally found some. Our satellite dish delivers an obscure channel called “FSTV,” which stands for “Free Speech Network.” It offers scores of left-wing documentaries and speeches by folks like Noam Chomsky.
Most of this is far too serious and depressing for my taste, but fortunately Comedy Central offers a side-splitting dose of biased liberal media almost every weekday with Jon Stewart at “The Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert, parodying Fox’s Bill O’Reilly on “The Colbert Report.” Airing at the same time is another fine and funny biased liberal media production, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” on MSNBC.
Those programs have fairly small audiences, though, and right-thinking critics generally aim their slings and arrows at the “MSM,” which stands for “mainstream media,” and which is presumed to be a hotbed of socialism or worse.
One paradox in this view is that it often accompanies some bragging about large ratings for Rush Limbaugh’s radio rantings as well as how Fox News leads the cable news channels. By definition, one would think, a program with a big audience is in the American mainstream. So with Limbaugh and Fox as part of the flow, the MSM couldn’t be all that liberal.
Liberal critics often assail the “corporate media.” This seems contradictory, too, since those doing the assailing are generally doing so via the corporate media. Besides, just about any enterprise of any size in this country is incorporated, even if it’s a tree-hugging knee-jerk bleeding-heart non-profit.
To put this another way, “Countdown” is delightfully anti-Bushite, but it comes from a network owned by Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, and NBC, a division of General Electric, a major defense contractor. The phrase “Corporate media” doesn’t mean conservative, any more than the phrase “mainstream media” means liberal.
With technological developments that made all of us Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year,” we now have the “new media” and the “legacy media,” too. We also have predictions of the imminent demise of legacy media, especially newspapers.
Granted, the industry has lost significant classified-ad revenue to Web offerings like Craigslist, and the process of slicing up dead trees and putting ink on them before physical delivery sounds rather antiquated. But newspapers, magazines and junk mail still operate.
In the 1920s, there were predictions that radio would kill newspapers. It caused some changes, like the elimination of most extra editions, but newspapers remained. In the 1950s, TV was going to demolish both radio and newspapers. It didn’t.
So it’s hard to believe that podcasts, YouTube, blogs and all the other “new media” will displace newspapers.
Newspapers require no special equipment, and you can read them anywhere. They come to your door, and you can get one for pocket change. When you’re done with one, you can use it for lining the birdcage or starting a fire in the woodstove. And most of them, as opposed to much of the “new media,” have writers and editors who care about the difference between singular and plural.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
