Once again in America, fiction flounders in the wake of reality TV. So does the traditional media. When I wanted to get an unfiltered measure of Governor Palin, the last object I was going to trust was the world's most famous news brand, The New York Times. In February, the Times published an egregious hatchet job on Senator McCain, a carefully constructed, front-page insinuation of an illicit affair that had never happened. The story was loaded with conflations, innuendos and anonymous accusations, and it buried emphatic denials and disputations at the bottom, far from the front page.

This was the same newspaper that had buried the real, and the true, adultery and sexual harassment stories that had threatened to derail Bill Clinton's bid for the Democratic nomination. People remember such things. And they notice news stories that read like opinion pieces.

Little has changed at the Times since the McCain hatchet job. The difference between the paper's coverage of Governor Palin and the parodies of her on the internet has been only a matter of degrees. You can see that the fix was in when the Times, and Obama-adoring journalists, kept mentioning Palin had not written her powerful acceptance speech, while failing to mention that all the candidates delivered speeches that had been scripted for them.

Governor Palin's shortage of heavyweight experience is self-evident. She may burn in the heat of the campaign. But if the non university-educated white voters who make up the largest voting bloc decide they want a real-life version of Mr Smith Goes To Washington (James Stewart's classic portrayal of the naive but incorruptible reformer appointed to the US Senate), Sarah Palin is going to have a popular legitimacy that transcends her limited resume.

This is what the Times, and the bulk of the Obama-infatuated traditional media, have failed to capture - or perhaps don't even want to capture. It is why Palin received the most visceral crowd response to her equally visceral acceptance speech when she set her sights on the news media: "Here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion. I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country."

It got one of the biggest responses of the night. Everywhere there are signs of growing cynicism with the media: an unwillingness to pay for what can be obtained free on the internet, a refusal to shuffle through the old media information portals, and a contagious knowingness and irony about the traditional media's self-proclaimed role as moral guardians and custodians of the public good.

All these elements have contributed to the rapid decline of the New York Times Company, like the decline of all other media companies that have failed to adapt to the tsunami of change. On Friday the share price of the New York Times Company fell to $US13.57 ($16.73). Five years ago it was $US48. The company's market value has slid to $US1.95 billion (or half the size of Fairfax Media, publisher of the Herald, which aggressively expanded and diversified its income stream over the same five years).

No company invested more in its journalism, or had a more famous and prestigious brand, or took itself more seriously, than the Times, yet this year it laid off 100 journalists. Three years ago, the company shed 500 staff, including 45 in the newsroom. When even the most famous brand in journalism is slashing staff, losing market value and attracting widespread criticism for bias, it underlines the reality that the cost structures and privileges of the old media are being swept away.

You don't have to look far. Organisations like the Sydney Morning Herald are not merely in a battle for market share. They are in a battle for survival.

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http://blogs.smh.com.au/urbanjungle/2008/09/sar ah_palin_spe.html