Howard Fineman says:
A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don’t mean the Democrats. I’m talking about the “mainstream media,” which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush’s Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox’s canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history….Were Dan Rather and Mary Mapes after the truth or victory when they broadcast their egregiously sloppy story about Bush’s National Guard Service? The moment it made air it began to fall apart, and eventually was shredded by factions within the AMMP itself, conservative national outlets and by the new opposition party that is emerging: The Blogger Nation. It’s hard to know now who, if anyone, in the “media” has any credibility.
It’s a little sour, gloomy and pessimistically written, but Fineman gets it. This is an exciting time for blogging, my friends.
Are some of you old enough to remember the advent of television? Radio? I wasn’t. By the time I came along, both were entrenched in the culture. I was around for the arrival of the computing revolution. When Apple II computers hit the classroom scene, I avoided them just like the rest of the technophobes. But enough of the 80s way-back machine. Ancient history.
YOU SHOULD BE BLOGGING, if you’re not already. I guess that was loud enough. For those of us still unborn in the 30s, 40s, 50s and part of the 60s, we finally have an invention, or whatever it’s called, that we can call our own: the Internet, or more specifically, blogging. Join the new medium now while it’s still in its infancy.
You know this blogging thing must be revolutionary when mainstream media (“legacy media” is becoming the preferred term) are talking and writing about what bloggers did to CBS. Says the Oakland Press:
It should not have been a great surprise that CBS tried to disguise a partisan political attack as a legitimate news story. TV news always has put a lot of opinion on the air as fact. The shock is that they didn’t get away with this time.The reason is that Internet blogs have drastically changed the nature of the national media scene. Now anybody can participate in news coverage and commentary on a real-time basis.
CBS was unmasked by people who put up Internet statements challenging the claim that the memos were authentic.
Then the traditional media noticed and also used and confirmed the new information. It took less than a day for that Internet action to reduce virtually all aspects of the “60 Minutes” report to embarrassing rubble.
That’s the power of the blog, which cannot be overstated.
Many people have asked me how to start a blog, not just the mechanics of setting it up but what to say and how to say it. That part is up to you, but I recommend Joe Carter’s “How to Start a Blog” series. I plan to write one of my own as soon as I’m finished reading the Rathergate report and Hugh Hewitt’s new book, BLOG: Understand the Information Reformation.
That’s all I have time for this morning. Just remember this:
“[T]he powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.”
— Walt Whitman, “Oh Me! Oh Life!,” from Leaves of Grass
