I've been listening to mainstream-media types talk about the terrible threat posed to the news business by one new phenomenon or other since I began my career 22 years ago. The complaint is invariably, and drearily, the same: Whatever is new is bad because it supposedly lowers the historically high standards of the mainstream media.
The last two years in particular have seen the explosion of a new medium — the personal Internet newspaper, or blog — that has already and will forever change the way people get their information.
This is a thrilling development — unless you are a mainstream-media Big Fish.
The success of the Swift-boat vets' ads is the tale of the triumph of the nation's alternative media. The mainstreamers didn't want to touch the story with a 10-foot pole, and they didn't. But the alternative media did. Amateur reporters and fact-gatherers offered independent substantiation for some of the charges. It turned out the criticisms of the Swifties weren't quite so easily dismissed.
Because there was new information coming out every day, there was more and more to discuss on talk radio and cable news channels. And the story just wouldn't go away, because millions of people were interested in it.
Monday, August 30, 2004
Main Stream Media: Crybabies
Instapundit points to a great article about the Media moaning:
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When the election's over I'm going to check with the Swiftees and see where they got the Christmas in Cambodia story.
Hewitt's the one to credit with keeping the story alive when it could have gone out, however. He beat the drums on it every day for 3 weeks, and pushed major bloggers on the show to keep the story going. We may have broken the story and even may have broken the story to the Swiftees, but Hewitt made sure that the media could not ignore it forever.
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