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CBS PULLS THE REAGANS, DECIDES TO RUN IT ON SHOWTIME
By Ed Driscoll · November 4, 2003 12:37 PM · Hollywood, Interrupted

CBS pulls The Reagans, decides to run it on Showtime. As Terry Teachout writes:

I’m sure that everybody and his sister will be blogging about this one, and they’ll mostly be right. Of course it’s a new-media story, and of course it wouldn’t have happened five years ago. I’ve been following Big Media’s coverage of the flap over The Reagans, and just two days ago I noted with interest and amusement a wire story claiming that CBS would be pleased by the controversy, since it would inevitably increase the series’ ratings. That is soooooo last year. Those of us who blog, whatever our political persuasions, know better. Boycotts of Big Media have always been feasible in theory. (Newspapers, in case you didn't know, take cancel-my-subscription-you-bastards letters very seriously—if they get enough of them.) In practice, though, they rarely worked, because it was too difficult to mobilize large-scale support quickly enough. No more. Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative-libertarian sector of the blogosphere have combined to create a giant megaphone through which disaffected right-wing consumers who have a bone to pick with Big Media can now make themselves heard.
Not surprisingly, Matt ("don't call me a Blogger") Drudge has some thoughts on the topic as well.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has an interesting slant on all this:

In some ways, I think Drudge has inadvertently rescued CBS. If the miniseries had run, the backlash would have been so great, the exposure of the poisonous bias in parts of CBS so final, it might have helped destroy the already-flailing old media network. So the new media saved the old media. That in itself, of course, is a major story. And Drudge deserves credit for reporting it. Yes, reporting it. Why do the old media never give him credit when he does journalism as well as any of them?
You know the answer as well as I (and Andrew) do: because Drudge has two strikes against him--he's on the Internet, and he's a conservative, neither of which many journalists trust.


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