Background Noise: Let Go, Frou Frou
Last website visited: morning news rounds
Mood: to comment
Right now i want... more coffee (surprised?)

The Main Stream Media's journalistic laziness and diminishing ethics were exposed to the world this week by those who had the audacity to question their conclusions in a public forum with a wide audience. That's right, ladies and gentleman, the blogspace has been validated and vindicated, and even though it has been long ignored and made fun of by the press and others who wished to control the flow of the national discussion, the blogspace has been paying attention and keeping score.

Excuse my flippancy, but in the past two days of catching snippets here and there of the main stream press's reluctant coverage of the fraudulent Bush memo's that CBS tried to foist on the trusting public, i've gotten pretty miffed at how rude and condescending those too-pretty anchors address bloggers. They fumble with terms, practically snickering on camera when talking about the people who blog, dismissing them offhand as guys in pj's.

Here's the thing those anchors haven't quite caught on to: the most popular weblogs, bulletin boards, and community forums that make up the blogspace have a larger viewer-ship than their shows do.

That's right, while there are certainly blogs that don't care about politics or current events, there are quite a few devoted to politics, especially in the months leading up to the election, and making sure there is enough information available for everyone to make an informed choice this november.

And those blogs and their bloggers don't trust the Main Stream Press to do that job. Blogs were responsible for the Abu Graib Prison story, the false Bush memos, the Kerry in Cambodia scandal, and other smaller stories that were ignored or not deemed important enough for the press to run. The blogspace was responsible for blasting NBC for it's lack of coverage of the Olympics, and for the rest of the Main Stream Press for reporting based on what NBC reported; very much like the press was reporting based on Dan Rather's 60 Mins report on President Bush.

The Main Stream Press has been skating on the honor system for quite a long time now, checked and balanced only by other journalists and other papers or news outlets intent on becoming "number 1 in news" at the cost of their competitors. And lately, those journalists have gotten lazy; not double checking sources or "evidence," running and rerunning stories as simultaneously as possible in a constant game of me-too-ism. And the public has noticed: the antics of the press have long been fodder for conversation among friends, but until recently there wasn't a large public forum where people from across the country and around the world could openly discuss and critique the quality of the news they were receiving.

That is what the blogspace allows for: instant public reaction on a large scale, discussion, critique, debate, with an ever growing need for more and better information. It is a place to keep score: "did you see this?" "i think that was faked", "they didn't report this in the US, but they did in Canada...". The blogspace is a beautiful thing: an open look at the pulse of a nation and a world.

The Main Stream Media should stop making fun of the blogspace, start paying attention, and be warned: your audience isn't captive anymore.