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...when right-wing bloggers, none of them a journalist in the traditional sense of the word, discovered that a potentially damaging report about President Bushs National Guard service, for which Rather was in part responsible, had apparently been based on forged documents. The MSM initially chose not to cover this story, but the blogosphere decided that it was newsand thereby made it news.By 2003, the year I started About Last Night, the mainstream media were finally taking reluctant note of political blogs, and 2004 saw a spectacular demonstration of their coming-of-age. Dan Rather, anchorman of the CBS Evening News since 1981, was forced into retirement
At the same time, more and more Americans, especially those in their thirties and younger, are turning away from the MSMonly 23 percent between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine read newspapersto embrace the new web-based media, which offer a proliferating variety of points of view and styles of communication.Rathers demise was one sign of the breakup of the big-media information monopoly. Another can be seen in the fast-declining circulation of American newspapersdown 13 percent since the peak year of 1984and the shrunken ratings of nightly network TV newscasts, which are now viewed by 28.8 million people, down from 52.1 million a quarter-century ago.
Even when they read print-media stories, moreover, web-oriented Americans tend to find them by going to blogs and other websites whose proprietors pick and choose at will from the MSMs offerings, linking to some stories and ignoring others according to their political inclinations. To get the news through the prism of a left-wing blog like Daily Kos or right-wing websites like Lucianne.com (www.lucianne.com) or RealClear Politics (www.realclearpolitics.com), all of which offer links to stories originally posted on the sites of such liberal newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post, is a very different experience from reading those newspapers themselves.
Rupert Murdoch, the founder and chairman of News Corporation, recently summed up the implications of these developments in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They dont want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They dont want to rely on a godlike figure from above to tell them whats important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly dont want news presented as gospel.
Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle.
What Murdoch did not say, but could have said, is that a country whose citizens live in culturally separate geographic enclaves, send their children to culturally separate schools, and get their news from culturally separate media is a country without a common culture. That is why the American Kultur- kampf petered out some time around the turn of the 21st century. Instead of staying to fight, Americans withdrew from the battleground, went home to cultivate their own cultural gardensand started blogging....
musicman said:Great post, Kathianne. As Adam's Apple posted in another thread, CNN will be broadcasting the biggest news stories of the last 25 years. Yet, somehow I believe they will manage to omit one of the most important events - one which will ultimately reshape history in ways we can't even imagine.
That story is, of course, the demise of the MSM/DNC monopoly.
