Thursday, December 30, 2004

How the corporate right meets the challenge of blogs and the Internet: "IF OLD MEDIA--the 'legacy media' of the big papers and old networks plus the newsweeklies--was a city and not simply a set of gasping institutions, it would look like Stalingrad circa 1944. Parts of most of the virtual buildings are still standing, but the devastation is pretty complete."

"The old media went left into a deep ditch of agenda journalism, forfeiting the trust of a large portion of their audience and, in the process, opening the door to Rush Limbaugh, the second generation of radio talkers, Fox News, and, of course, the blogs."

This is the usual tactic of attacking the corporate media as being hopelessly left-wing combined with a willingness (even eagerness$$$) to accept it will be replaced by blogs and internet journalism. Hence there must be a big and well-financed push into blogging with the purpose of creating a self-reinforcing right-wing echochamber, to develop and protect the delusions of the misinformed mass supporters. The push has already shown itself to be remarkably successful. In fact it may have created a phenomenon where the public mind is split between different spheres of the internet which essentially do not communicate with each other. How to breach this communication divide? One means may be politics, where everyone is forced to address similar issues. Another may be the Chomsky approach, to force oneself (ugghhh!!!) to read it and systematically demolish it.

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