« Too Much Real Life... | Main | The World's Problems »
March 7, 2006
Poison
There is a very small window open to the MSM (I hate the all-inclusiveness of that term, but it's so convenient because everyone realizes who it refers to, even though that's not even really implied in the term itself) to fix its problem before it is destroyed. The bias and lying and flacking and agenda-pushing has been so evident for so long that companies manipulate the press openly; even rabid news watchers tune out and instead look to blogs and foreign news sources; and now the administration is starting be openly adversarial to the press. There is a small, small window of opportunity left during which this part of the theoretically news reporting world can reform, can win back the trust it has squandered since 1968, and can become useful to society. If not — if they refuse to see themselves as Americans first, reporters of fact second, and writers of stories not at all; if they do not in other words see themselves as they say they do, as holders of a public trust for all of us — my children will not grow up to be adults in a world where traditional media has any power at all.
The ball is entirely in the media's court now, though. We won't need them much longer: anyone can make things up and put stock footage behind them, and it won't be long before anyone can access raw data (images, sounds, interviews, local opinions and so forth) about any place in the world, as they can already access a wealth of intelligent amateur opinion about those data. At the point, in the very near future, when the two advantages of news organizations — having a person paying attention in a place where something interesting is happening; and having access to government and corporate officials — are no longer operative, news organizations will no longer be operating, at least not as they do now.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/886