President Obama said yesterday:
I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.But as Dan Rather pointed out in July, the quality of journalism in the mainstream media has eroded considerably, and news has been corporatized, politicized, and trivialized...
No wonder trust in the news media is crumbling.
Indeed, people want change - that's why we voted for Obama - but as Newseek's Evan Thomas admitted:
By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring....
"If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am). . . ."
So
traditional newspapers are also losing readers to the extent they are
writing puff pieces instead of writing the kinds of things people want
to read: hard-hitting stories about what is going on in the country and
the world.
Finally, as I wrote in March, the whole Internet-versus-traditional-media discussion misses the deeper truth:
The popularity of some reliable internet news sources are growing by leaps and bounds. For example, web news sources which run hard-hitting investigative news stories on the economy - and do not simply defer to Bernanke, Geithner, Summers and other people "of the establishment persuasion" - are gaining more and more readers.The whole debate about blogs versus mainstream media is nonsense.
In fact, many of the world's top PhD economics professors and financial advisors have their own blogs...
The same is true in every other field: politics, science, history, international relations, etc.
So what is "news"? What the largest newspapers choose to cover? Or what various leading experts are saying - and oftentimes heatedly debating one against the other?
It is not because it is some new, flashy media. It's because people want to know what is going on ... and some of the best reporting can now be found on the web.
Subtle, Unintentional Propaganda?
If there are bailouts of the newspaper industry, will the government take ownership of the media corporations, as it has in AIG and some of the giant banks?
Will that - in turn - lead to a situation in which
the government representatives subtly and innocently censors
anti-government stories? After all, the object of criticism might be
the employer or friend of the government representatives on the
newspaper board.
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