Scout and Athenae at First Draft have done fine job of lacerating Brian Williams' wailing and lamentation that the rise of the Internet in general and YouTube in particular are making us miss out on the important stories of today. Yeah, you heard that right - blogs are making us miss important news. He also goes on to ponder how much worse off we'd be if there had been blogs ten years ago. If there had been blogs ten years ago, I'd wager there would have been no impeachment of Bill Clinton and give you even odds that George W. Bush would not have been elected. Anyway...
What I find most interesting in all of this mainstream media vs. blogosphere business, to the extent that it's interesting at all, is their almost biologically ingrained inability to understand that people who have walked away from mainstream news might - just might - have done so because the content sucked. That's usually the reason people stop using any product, and as much as we'd like think otherwise, the news is a product. This blog is a product.
Even people like Lowell Bergman, who really should know better considering the circumstances of his departure from CBS News, can't seem to get their heads around this. His otherwise excellent Frontline documentary "The News Wars" discusses blogs as an additional distraction for the dwindling audience of printed news media but doesn't explore in any meaningful way why people like us have just about given up on papers like The New York Times.
Look, media folk, we're not magpies, flitting madly after whatever shiny objects we happen to catch sight of. We're fairly intelligent people who have a need for more and better information than you are currently providing.
And every once in a while we like to watch otters holding hands.
You know, Brian Williams never bitched like this when he had an hour long news program on basic cable that the newsetainment chiefs at GENBC didn't give a shit about. Now that he's got the anchor's chair, and he's all annoyed because he HAS to report on Anna Nicole Smith--it must be that damn internet! It couldn't be the the totally made up ratings war for national news on the big three. There's a reason Brokaw decided to go out at the the top of his game, even though his two main rivals were dead or discredited.
On a related note, have you ever read/seen/listened to Jeff Jarvis on the battle between OM and NM? Here's the url--http://www.buzzmachine.com/
He gets a little preachy about the rise of the "citizen-journalist" sometimes, but its pretty good stuff, even if he seems to push the Kool Aid a little too much at times.
Posted by: King Ed Ra | April 16, 2007 at 03:47 PM