The “dean” of news anchors, Tom Brokow, argues that information filtering is more necessary than ever because the Internet is so full of unsupported facts that it needs responsible people — presumably like him — to separate the wheat from the chaff.
MR. BROKAW: Well, I’ve — one of the things I’ve been saying to audiences is this question comes up a lot, and a lot of people will repeat back to me and take it as face value something that they read on the Internet. And my line to them is you have to vet information. You have to test it the same way you do when you buy an automobile or when you go and buy a new flat-screen television. You read the Consumer Reports, you have an idea of what it’s worth and what the lasting value of it is. You have to do the same thing with information because there is so much disinformation out there that it’s frightening, frankly, in a free society that depends on information to make informed decisions. And this is across the board, by the way. It’s not just one side of the political spectrum or the other. It is across the board, David, and it’s something that we all have to address and it requires society and political and cultural leaders to stand up and say, “this is crazy.” We just can’t function that way.
YouTube Direkt
But the really good line, I think, came from Tom Friedman who said cogently argued that technology has made everyone a member of the new media and Friedman, like Brokaw, thinks this is terrible.
When everyone has cellphone, everyone is a photographer. When everyone has access to YouTube, everyone is a film maker. And when everyone is a blogger, everyone is a newspaper. When everyone is a photographer, a newspaper and a film maker, everyone else is a public figure. Tell your kids, be careful. Every move you make is a digital footprint.
Mr. Friedman never paused to think that his warning to the kids might be interpreted both ways. Are people to fear the new technology because it may digitally capture any acts they may later regret or because it may lets the powers track the fact that they captured regrettable acts which no one wants seen? The Old Media, hand it to them, knew information was “hot stuff”. They understood how to gain power from it, make money from it even Change history with it. Whenever they see a blogger bring down a public figure for essentially nothing, what is it that they think? Of the injustice of it or of pearls thrown at swine? Perhaps the real distinction between the New and the Old journalism is that the new citizen journalists haven’t discovered the insider’s ground rules yet; don’t understand that journalism isn’t just about discovering the news but using it as the lifeblood that flows through a network of contacts; that it is employed according to usages that were hinted at, but rarely written down, for purposes that were understood but only occasionally disclosed.
With the old media model rapidly growing bankrupt, the focus of its floundering managers has been to find new revenue models to replace subscriptions or advertising. But maybe they are failing because their business analysis is incomplete: it doesn’t take into account the changes it must make to the groundrules having to do with those who are in power. They can no longer deal with any part of their environment from a position of monopoly, as Cronkite once did and as Brokaw finds he can no longer do. The media has become far closer to a competitive market than at any time since the Gutenberg press was invented.
How do you make money in a competitive market? Think on that one, Tom.
Well, maybe Tom should advise his colleagues on vetting info.
Wolverines!
Funny, I’ve seen the NYT as an open sewer and repository of bad judgment for the past several years.
And didn’t Tommy Boy just say that he liked the Chinese system of government as a way to get the right things done? Something we should emulate?
That’s what I read on the internet, anyway.
The loss of control does, indeed, seem to be getting to him.
I Have to Admit that I agree with the statements from both authors on face value. Every thing you post on the Internet will probably end up in some giant repository somewhere with memory <$100/TB.
The days of anonymity are long gone.
And there is a lot of specious crap out there too. That’s precisely why I do not watch big network news except for FNC and CNN, and with a jaundiced eye at that. This blog and others are mindful enough to let the news cycle simmer a little under the slow heat of a little skepticism. Prod, stir, flip, and repeat until done. It ain’t done until it’s dun and we don’t have deadlines.
Imagine if every opinion began and ended with a John Williams trumpet score.
The lament about how journalism USED to be is, to me, the silliest of all. When, exactly, did this magical era of pure journalism exist? Has no one read Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’? Does the name David Halberstam ring a bell? Hell, I’m not even past my mid-30s and I know this notion of the old ‘pure news’ is complete fantasy.
When PC computers started popping up and allowed distributed computing to occur, the old main frame gate keepers lost their monolopy and a lot more computing happened and a lot of people realized that there was power at their finger tips. The net/phone/blog is just an extension of that trend and the powers that are don’t like the loss of POSITION at the trough.
The issue with the media to me is that as they have been challenged they have gotten even less even handed about the hidden Progressive agenda that was an unspoken fact of their world for at least 100 yrs. Sort of doubling down under stress. At least some of their audiance would return if they were a more central idea medium but it appears that dinosauars don’t want to change their diet.
I won’t miss them at all. I would rather have no info, than info I can’t trust. Let me winnow what is fact from fiction.
We just can’t function that way.
Juanita Broaddrick could not be vetted for comment.
Brokaw (amazingly) forgets what brought down the self-appointed political elite of the old USSR back in mid-1991. Ordinary individuals using photocopy machines and faxes became their own publishing and information nodes, in a fashion quite similar to American broadsheets in 1775 and 1776.
When the moribund forces of the old elite attempted to squelch the peaceful revolution in August 1991, the tragi-comically sent the Army to protect the telephone exchange, Pravda, the state run radio station, and the telegraph office.
They had no idea what was happening to them, and neither do the old-line media elite in America. They no longer matter. They’re starting to figure that out, and they hate it.
The Senate voted 83 to 7 in the ACORN matter, despite every attempt by the oldlines to ignore the story completely. Again, they no longer matter.
How many people under age 67 watch Brokaw? Forty-six? Oh, maybe 283 … whatever. And while the old liberals of that generation are dying at a rate of 4 million per year, their potential replacements barely exist — because many of them were aborted.
Over the long-term, liberalism is a self-correcting problem. It’s just that they do an awful lot of damage in the process.
neither one of these guys has ever said anything worth paying for, and never will. a trained parrot could do brokaw’s job. friedman is no one’s idea of a great thinker. his actual level of talent makes him suitable for writing advertising copy for a small town department store. whiny old cranks.
Jeffrey Lord over at the American Spectator eviscerates Tom Brokaw. See here: http://spectator.org/archives/2009/09/15/media-malpractice-tom-brokaws,
I actually heard that soundbite (I think Rush played it) and it was astounding in both its condescension and its insularity. Of course if you never leave the BosWash corridor, I’m sure all the people you meet agree with you. But America is not the coasts.
What I was striving unsuccessfully to convey in the main post was that a “great journalist” wasn’t simply someone who could dig up facts and memorably write them up, but was able to use these skills to weave himself into the tapestry of power. For the best of them, it was a sacred mission; their self-belief able to convince them that being ghost riders in the power process was somehow beneficial to the world. Being a “journalist” then entailed being able to keep the secrets and make the myths. It was as self-conscious keepers of the flame that they derived their sense of worth, the flame being alternately dark and brilliant, depending on whether the impetus preceded from the nether or the celestial regions. It didn’t hurt that it paid well, too.
Now that era is gone. Killed by technology. But in case we get the mistaken impression that the change was only to do with newsgathering part of it, the real change is that it has changed the color of the tapestry. It’s changed the power relationships of the press within the system. In that sense the new media revolution was a “constitutinal crisis”. Do you know what I think Brokow resents? He resents the fact that he can’t deliver like he used to in both ways; he resents the fact that the powers are now treating him like they know he can’t deliver, he feels it on the edge of handshake, in the slight smiles he never used to see. The idea that people out there are doing stuff for free that was once worth mucho dinero is especially galling. Like what the bikini revolution did to exotic dancers, it has ruined an art.
The succeeding news model must resolve not only the newsgathering end of things but also create new “constitutional arrangements”. If the traditional 4th estate is dead, in terms of its old constitution, how will the new media evolve its arrangements with the others powers that be? This I think is an important issue that no one has thought about: what is the long term impact of the information revolution on the power structure of government? It will develop its own rules, not by fiat, but by negotiation and bruising. We’re only watching the beginning.
so Brokaw thinks that he should filter information for us. Does he really think that he’s capable of doing this impartially and competently?What kind of an ego does this man have?the most dangerous person in the world is someone who can’t see or admit to his own shortcomings,Brokaw and Friedman are definitely club members.
Walter Cronkite and the “this war is lost” statement was an example of this power and probably reached its apogee in the impeachment of Richard Nixon. The media changed into a kind of magazine form later and everyone else and the “hard hitting” expose’s of the 60 minute evolved into a kind of who can bring down the man one-upmanship. Since then those thinking they were doing serious journalism have been joining a one-sided echo chamber. John Stossel has put up a lonely front for the other side but nobody in the chamber is listening and when they do, they piddle on opposing points of view.
Brokaw and Friedman and perfect examples of why “douchebag” is such an indispensable word.
So who is to vet for us our omniscient anchors? Why should I have even the slightest confidence in a guy who graduated from a fifth string cow college? Whose personal experience has been limited to corporate news and proadcasting? Who is not known to have served in either the military or the civil service, or anything else? He’s always been an observer, not a doer. He knows how to get his hair done.
Friedman and Brokaw made their remarks in relation to the Van Jones resignation. Of course Czar Jones was criticized for remarks made in speeches. In fact, some of the U-tube videos were five minutes segments of speeches or more. I saw some that approached a Rev. Wright Rant in intensity. In others, he achieved the full Jeremiah. These were not off the cuff, or off the record, remarks. They were not made with the expectation of privacy. Czar Jones was addressing groups or producing CDs or making remarks that were published in magazines and newspapers.
As for Friedman’s suggestion about warning labels for the Internet, we should remember that after the warning labels come the taxes. And then more taxes. Then stronger warning labels. Then much higher taxes. And so on.
Kind of a side note:
Though it is changing, most of the news and opinion on the internet is in a written form. Thus it is stripped of a lot of emotional content and it is subjected to widespread analysis. The old broadcast dinosaurs are verbal presenters and never were all that good at writing IMHO and never really put that much effort into it. If it fit the “liberal” template it was good enough.
The other mistake Brokaw makes is imagining that people don’t have filters when reading stuff for themselves. In fact they create their own. I’m willing to bet that each reader on the Internet identifies a “go-to” guy or short list of sources for their facts or opinion on varying issues. So they create the “custom” filters.
The really interesting question is how internet readers choose their “custom” filters. I think people create their filters based on a posteriori experience with accuracy. For example why do people come to this site? I like to think it is in part because the readers think back and say, “yeah, the Belmont Club got that right or said something valid about that”. If an author keeps getting it wrong, ideally he should be voted out of the filter. The real question for me is why a guy like Robert Fisk can keep working in journalism. It seems to me that if you just keep calling it wrong, eventually, in an Internet environment, your audience would correspondingly shrink. The MSM media, by contrast was able to artificially boost people up whatever their track record.
So this is 3, maybe 4 threads in one.
First, the hubris of these self-inflated has-beens. Second, Wretchard’s theme of the withering of a cultural estate. Third, the distraction employed by Brokaw and Friedman to avoid the obvious: Van Jones’ abject lunacy and the choice by our hero to invite him into the fold.
The fourth theme might be that of how long the estate they mourn actually existed. I know the press was influencing things inordinately during the Nixon/Kennedy years, when they reversed Americana by championing the patrician over the bread-and-butter down-home guy, followed by their elevation to iconic status with Watergate. But I’m not sure how uniform or one-sided their influence was before that.
As for the question of filters, I think it may be more about what allows you to know the truth when you see it. If you live in a po-mo, multicultural, relativistic world, you lose sight, it seems to me, of what is good and what is evil, what is true and what is false. If you don’t, it’s really not that difficult to know what’s true, what’s false, and what needs to be explored further.
The key when there’s lots of uncertainty is really convergent validity. What explains the most of the available and verifiable data wins. Conversely, “The abuse of the truth always involves making the fragment self-sufficient and independent of the whole.” Von Balthasar, more or less.
Information and knowledge. Knowledge and information.
There’s a lot of information out there, but the major news media had a way of taking that information and shaping the narrative (which had the illusion of “knowledge”), which had significant political overtones. Sometimes they played to power, sometimes they “spoke truth to power”, and sometimes they played a more deceptive game.
There is a memetic nature to the major networks and news services. One of the things that Rush Limbaugh does on his program that is most amusing is to play clips from the networks’ news talkers. It is interesting in the span of a 24 hour or 48 hour news cycle, how often the news talkers on a host of different networks say the same thing, and how it echoes the written word in the major print media.
What the individual on the internet has is the power to break the dictatorship of the memetic message and reject false “knowledge”. There is another narrative (or many narratives) that can be synthesized from the same facts. An honest appraisal of the facts and a truthful analysis is the beginning of the path to true knowledge.
The trap that the major news organs have fallen into is their narrow minded determinism that is created from the leading opinion makers in the news. They create the narrative, then find the facts to fill in the blanks. And that is what Brokaw meant about being a filter. No inconvenient facts, thank you very much, we have a narrative going on here, so let’s break for a commercial now. It is a comfortable place to be, among your friends. But it begins to look like the path to extinction.
It is up to the new people on the Internet to avoid that trap. Don’t allow yourself to become a prisoner of your beliefs, allowing opinion to trump the facts of the matter. And it is also up to the reader or consumer of the narrative to not allow himself/herself to become trapped in a view of the world that can at times be inconsistent with reality.
1) jW/10–great link. Back then they could keep the secrets and that’s what they miss–being in on something delicious that the chumps don’t know about. I’ve posted here before about my friend who had a summer job with a newspaper in about 1960 when over the AP wire came a picture of Sen Long of Louisiana, drunk and urinating on a potted palm in a hotel lobby. Every news room in the USA knew about it and it was never reported. I saw the picture.
2) In the UK, talking heads are called ‘news readers’ which just about describes the level of skill needed.
3) One sign of when “journalism” began to fall apart was when they started interviewing each other on TV. How incestuous can you get?
4) It’s true: you get both chicken salad and chicken manure on the web. Difference is, the manure doesn’t last long in the light of day (are you listening, Dan?).
i go to two kinds of sites:
1) news aggregators like lucianne.com (where the comments are worthless, btw)
2) information synthesizing sites, like this one
sites i never go to? ny times, cbs.com, etc, etc
i also never go to leftist sites, since by definition they won’t present anything but the party line. also, leftists are pretty uninteresting for the most part.
When everyone has access to the internet and blogs, everyone is a fact checker and an editor. With comments allowed they can do so for others and others do so for them.
In some blog worlds this has the cream float to the top. In other realms the dross is what rises. Quickly determining which type you are reading is the ability needed.
“When everyone has cellphone, everyone is a photographer. When everyone has access to YouTube, everyone is a film maker. And when everyone is a blogger, everyone is a newspaper. When everyone is a photographer, a newspaper and a film maker, everyone else is a public figure.”
When everyone has access to the internet and blogs, everyone is a fact checker and an editor. With comments allowed they can do so for others and others do so for them.
In some blog worlds this has the cream float to the top. In other realms the dross is what rises. Quickly determining which type you are reading is the ability needed.
Sorry about the double post. 1st one didn’t appear so I removed the blockquote HTML thinking it may have messed it up.
Mr. Brokow has it right and wrong at the same time. News filters are desirable. But when they are broken, you throw the old broken ones away.
And there is a fundamental difference between being a journalist and a propagandist, but this is a concept that people like Mr. Brokow seem incapable of understanding. News filters that do nothing but echo propaganda are intrinsically “broken,” and people who have any options to replace them will throw the defective product away.
The only mystery here is why people like Mr. Brokow can’t seem to understand this.
Well, it may not be that we need to look for a “model” for new media that somehow parallels the MSM, particualrly when it coes to “insider networks, power plays, influence pedaling, etc. It may be that its “guidlines” are more that of the smaller public square of the county, or city: Good old oommon courtesies tempered with candor and even bluntness, and of course, self selction to forums/cliques as well. Not much different than it is today. There may ot really be a “model” for it at all. Perhaps this is the wrong question to ask.
In great measure, the MSM was created by FDR through the creation of the FCC, broadcast licensing games, etc., and he created it for obvious reason. This coincided with,and was an enabling force for, the great gathering of pwoer in Washington, the growing separation between the people and a more pronounced political class. As big government created big business, “big law” and big unions, so it created big media as well.
It may be, if we manage to turn this around, that the centralized, national political model breaks, along with the notion of a “national political class” and the local model becomes more important, the large world matter only where there is common cause. It may be that the Statehouses become more the focus than DC.
In any event, it is fairly clear that the average citizen and more fundamental educations dn common sense–and evidently a great more courage too–than does the current MSM. We can interpret event for ourselves. An army of Davids armed with video recording devices is of more use than “reporting. There is a role for paid, high quality analysts and investigators, but this has never been a part of the MSM’s actual role. This view comes from the Buckley’s and the Rush’s of the world.
This is to say the internet, just as it is, is the “model”. The very notion of a journalist is up for grabs. Remember, it is really only an invention of the 19th century.
It may be folks do not need them at all any more. Not one of any stripe.
The media has become far closer to a competitive market than at any time since the Gutenberg press was invented.
How do you make money in a competitive market? Think on that one, Tom.
Exactamundo, wretchard, bravo.
And as biased as Cronkite may have been about the Tet offensive or the NYTimes may have been about Stalin, the degree to which the MSM these days filters and warps the news, I believe is unprecedented.
If the LATimes simply returned to the semi-objective formats they used as late as the 1970s, I’d subscribe to the dead tree version.
But by the 1990s, their news pages became so offensively biased that even before the web had entirely caught on I stopped buying the daily papers.
With the timeliness of the web, with hyperlinks and Google a click away, and discussion forums to boot, the print versions had better be *excellent* to survive – and they’re not.
When you watch the networks–and other TV channels–after, say, ten in the evening, you may think it’s unfair to those of us trying not to gain weight. Just when supper is wearing off we have full-color close-ups of angus burgers, Olive Garden entrees, pork spitting in a bath of barbeque sauce.
That’s fortunate, because if you were watching the six-thirty news, you’d have lost your appetite, not to mention any optimism you had about your personal future, because of all the big pharma ads with their explicit descriptions of the affliction in question, and a lengthy and rapid-fire list of horrifying side-effects. Almost all having to do with aging.
Now, I think advertisers are pretty good at selling clients but only so-so at moving product. But they do do their homework and they are almost certainly right about the demographic watching the six-thirty network news.
Coincidentally, this is the demographic facing the dead-grandma panels and the cuts in Medicaid and having to hear about it someplace else.
Poor MSM can’t catch a break.
Matt Drudge was truly ahead of his time when he started, and the “old media” truly behind the times. I was very impressed when he gave the National Press Club interview:
http://www.libertyroundtable.org/library/essay.drudge.html
Funniest reoccuring question was: “Who is funding you?” “Where do you get your funds?” They could not understand what a guy and basic HTML could do, for only they, the anointed ones, had the right to publish information for public consumption.
Man how times have changed…at least for some.
What is particularly wonderful for us “out here” in the blogosphere is that this revolution is happening in real time and, I think, at an accelerating rate. The old order has been metastable for years: technology had overtaken the old order’s actual capabilities but it was running on its accumulatred social capital, the brand. That could not last forever, and the elite like Brokaw and Rather and Friedman hastened things by insisting on the old prerogatives, controlling the cycle and content of what they would dispense. But their insistence was made to audiences newly skeptical of the multiplying errors and abuses, newly enthused by the powers now accessible to them, no longer consumers but producers, editors, rebroadcasters as well of the news. And that discrepancy between brand promise and brand delivery has grown and grown. Like an iceberg eaten away below the waterline by an unseen warm current, the whole beautiful mass is now toppling as we watch.
Which does not mean that things get better or simpler. Wretchard asks the right question, about what kind of systems will we all adopt, or be given, to find news, gather and aggregate it, find or assign it a storyline (a kind of meta-tag), and then (crucially) error-check it. Wikipedia is a pretty good model but it may not work at all, or as well, for “this-minute” news cycles. Personally I think we will all need to raise our personal games on BS detection and a portfolio of trusted critics.
Wretchard, just want to say you run a helluva site. Your insights are always solid singles and doubles, often triples, and regularly include out-of-the-park shots. Thanks.
I’d rather choose my gatekeepers myself, thank you Mr. Brokaw.
What’s happening is the reintegration of popular opinion into the public sphere. For a long time elites were able to control the airwaves and the printing presses.
Now that’s no longer possible. The first crack was talk radio, which was really people hearing what they already believed. Talk radio isn’t telling people what to think, but sharing what they already think.
Now the same process is moving to cable TV. It’s the final death of political correctness and the final defeat of elite control of what opinions are allowed wide distribution in the public sphere.
People like Rush and Beck aren’t so much opinion makers as followers.
The downside of this is that a lot of widely held opinions are wrong. Very often the media elite was more reliable and did a better job at filtering bogus stories (they got much worse at this in the years since 2000). Also, we’ve lost a common sphere for discussion, as we don’t all watch the same news. Now people can live and work together but have completely different sources of information. For instance, if you are a liberal right now you might be totally unaware of what’s happening to ACORN.
However, it’s hard to see how an elite monopoly on opinion could have continued much longer with the internet. It had to happen sometime.
I recall seeing Gary Spence, that cowboy hat-wearing lawyer, on Fox News during Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky crisis. His problem was not that the President was a philanderer, or lied under oath, or that all this had led to an impeachment, but that the whole thing was so unsavory, literally dirty clothes displayed out in the open. His concept of the legal profession was clearly that it was one in which proper decorum was maintained – not to mention that said decorum helped certain elites gain key advantages.
During the Texas Air National Guard Memos flap, on Fox News they interviewed an old line network reporter, a face I recalled. His problem was not that CBS and Rather had engaged in a conspiracy to affect a U.S. Presidental election but that the focus was on the making of the news rather than the story itself. “We have to get the focus back on the story and not the reporting of it!” he whined.
It is interesting how people in certain professions have established rules to their advantage and then expect everyone else to play along. But one of the things the U.S. has been most successful at is changing the rules in warfare. Coventry was a legitimate target but Dresden was not, to hear the Nazis tell it. Nanking and Manila were just one of the things that happen in war according to the Imperial Japanese, but Hiroshima was a horrible tragedy. Well, now the rules are being changed again for a different group of elites.
Here’s what ABC’s Charles Gibson had to say about the recent ACORN story:
“I don’t even know about it [the ACORN prostitution scandal],” Gibson said, laughing. “So you’ve got me at a loss. … But my goodness, if it’s got everything, including sleaziness in it, we should talk about it in the morning…. [The story is] just one you leave to the cables.”
He said this today (9-15-09). The attitudes of these people are so outrageous, I’m beginning to wonder if they are all completely insane, or perhaps I am.
Wretchard @11,
“…[H]ow will the new media evolve its arrangements with the other powers that be?”
To the degree that this evolution can be steered, then it will be important to avoid repeating the mistakes that NBC, MSNBC and Time Warner/CBS made. IOW, don’t become overly dependent on partisan political marketing. GE did: it hoped to accelerate the profitable replacement of its product line, from its electric-generating turbines and its jumbo jet-engines, to its hot-water heaters and its light bulbs, all over the world by getting the old ones legislated into obsoletion.
Clever huh?
(The result was a shrill global marketing campaign, ridiculous political poses like “Illegal War,” Keith Olbermann and “Bush Lied,” and a thread-worn media brand. A Friedman or a Brokaw might dignify the brand’s product from the past eight years by calling it “journalism,” but I’d call it differently. I think GE has worn MSNBC like a dirty diaper, and everyone with a functioning sniffer o’er the past eight years has been saying it needs changing! Watch out for that.)
The other tip that I’d offer is legal in nature. Watch for the Continentals’ asserting their strict libel laws, which have classically been employed to protect aristocracies from criticism, on the new media model from their haughty benches in Paris or The Hague. New Media may want to lawyer-up a little in advance on this one, so as to keep this the People’s forum that I know we all want it to be.
The old order has been metastable for years: technology had overtaken the old order’s actual capabilities but it was running on its accumulated social capital, the brand.
It is painful to watch an old and valuable brand destroyed. Even those who saw their defects had a fondness for the old icons. Watching what was once respected fall down is like watching Sunset Boulevard. I’ve often hoped that liberals, out of love for the past, for the old time’s sake of a former flame, would keep them from making fools of themselves. Sometimes I imagine that I see this desire to escape, from what must now be a horrifying, flooding chamber, in the expressions of some of the media figures. They are not stupid men and women; and chances are, they have at least the average amount of decency.
Maybe one day we’ll see a respected figure do a Network style meltdown and choose his dignity as a man and yes, as a journalist over the charade. He’ll just get up and announce he’s going fishing, and taking his son along while he’s at it. “Take this job and shove it, I ain’t working here no more.”
bump
Marshall Mcluhan said in the early sixties that “the media was the message”. His insight was that television had a far greater impact than print media because it was a “streaming media” (he didn’t say that exactly) and as it was much more real time “in your face media” than newspapers or magazines, that the act of watching TV so involved the viewer, that the message and the delivery media became blurred. Cable and broadcast TV are highly programmed to fit the program and the time slot, so its necessary for lots of editing and filtering of content. Producers with a political agenda will certainly cut “parts” of the programming out and edit in “bits” that enable them to shape the message. Broadcast is also a point-to-multi-point communications network, and until recently there were few feedback loops.
The Internet of course is a peer to peer, multi-point to multi-point communications network that evolves multiple layers of feed back loops and information validation/verification which in essence is a filtering process in itself. Then there’s the BS indicator that evolves as you sample and winnow through the magnitudes of information that seemly are now endlessly streamed from everywhere. The problem for Friedman and Browcaw is that they lost their monopoly and will never regain the “moral high ground” that they believed they attained in their point-multipoint media world where the accolades for reporting and news broadcasting were handed out in a closely held environment of the Emmy Awards and Pulitzer prizes.
“You have to do the same thing with information because there is so much disinformation out there that it’s frightening, frankly, in a free society that depends on information to make informed decisions.”
Man, if anyone living would know about “disinformation” it would be Brokaw. He’s put whole libraries of it out there in his career. That line is the pot calling the kettle black at orders of infinite magnitude. I don’t trust the MSM to get ANYTHING right anymore. ALL their news is slanted. The sooner he, and the rest of his ilk, are put out to pasture, the better.
Watch for the Continentals’ asserting their strict libel laws, classically employed to protect aristocracies, on the new media model from their haughty benches in The Hague. New Media may want to lawyer-up a little in advance on this one, so as to keep this the People’s forum that I know we all want it to be.
The issue seems to have died for the moment, but do you remember some years back when it was widely asserted that the administration of the Internet should be given over to someone other than the US? I mean, we were threatened. The US could be cut off from accessing EU websites. Wow. I still remember the trembling that induced in me. It wasn’t much. And when it came down to it, the Europeans just shut up.
Expect the issue to rise again. As you say, when all is said and done, the prime force is the powerful preserving their power with the mask of whatever ideology is popular with the idiots of the day.
Brokaw is an idiot to think he can control alternative media. Brokaw, you are not mainstream anymore. You belong to the yesteryear, just enjoy your retirement and leave the new media alone.
The press has not changed, the reporting in lights of those in power, the tainted vision of the way things are, have not adjusted since the time of the Yellow Journals of pre and post Civil War days. About the only thing that has changed is the medium, and notion that the guys on the TV News Shows were somehow more than entertainers, and above the Yellow Journalism of a Horace Greeley.
Harper’s Weekly stood, at one point, on the pen of a Pajama like editor and the pencil of a German Immigrant named TH Nast. The depth of the stories and the caricatures of the players were worthy of the Best of Limbaugh. Not only did the combination of Nast and Harpers take on and take down Tamney Hall, They were also credited (none seriously) with the elevation of Horace Greeley to serious Presidential consideration. It was Greeley himself who credited Nast with his rising political stature v. a second term of US Grant. Curious parallels to Limbaugh and Obama, (none seriously)? Maybe, but please note that Nast was an ardent fan and supporter of President US Grant.
But even President Lincoln learned to laugh first at himself, much to the major tabloids dismay, before laughing at others. Laughter is a serious subject to which the current administration has not devoted enough study despite the wealth of laughing stock material it has provided.
Nast and Limbaugh are a comparison awaiting scholarly study. Both are the masters of and in many ways the founders of their medium. Both use humor to portray analogously the foibles of the powerful and those who would pull the wool over peoples eyes with puffery and bribes. Both have many imitators on many sides, but few can match the honest portrayal of current political vice as well as they. Most that try are crude and become either boorish and mean, or are weak imitations.
The issues of old media v new media are not news. The lack of money in media, for news is. People pay to listen to Limbaugh, and paid for a look at Nast’s works. I donate to help ensure the work of some folks will not be interrupted. Who in the hell would subscribe to hear Brokaw about anything. I would rather listen to corn grow, and I believe I would learn more.
oMan @ 32: … the elite like Brokaw and Rather and Friedman hastened things by insisting on the old prerogatives, controlling the cycle and content of what they would dispense.
They hastened the dilution of their own personal brands, perhaps, I can’t see they had any further effect on anything. Ye olde King Canute syndrome.
Perhaps this current situation is the best of all possible worlds! The old brands get a little revenue from their web sites, not nearly what they used to command via their local monopolies, but such is the disintermediating power of the Internet.
The throwaway freebie LAWeekly manages on a horribly inefficient basis, but is still an inch thick most weeks, must be approaching the same print advertising volume as the LATimes, supported by nothing but third-string retailers and soft-pr0n. OK, they have cut their already very modest editorial content to nearly zero, chasing David Corn and Michael Ventura to other venues. Still, it’s some (slight) evidence that print is not all that dead as a medium, it’s the printers, the MSM, who have simply grown senile. Heck, maybe even the massage parlors became embarrassed to run next to Corn and Ventura.
David Brinn wrote The Transparent Society ten years ago in which he correctly predicted the pervasiveness of video recording everyone’s actions and suggested that instead of fighting the march of technology we should use it to society’s advantage. Given that governments, the rich, and big business will have the ability to snoop on all of us, we need to make sure we have the ability to snoop on them. We’re not fully there yet, but seem to have gone far enough to rattle the power brokers.
This is also changing the very notion of privacy. I can’t say I welcome life in a fishbowl, but I guess it’s better if we’re all in it together instead of mostly fish with the powerful alone having hooks.
It’s also ironic that the presumed qualified news filters might not actually have the faintest idea what is really happening because they operate in such a small, unreal universe of experience.
I heard an interview today with Charles Gibson in which he was asked about the latest doing of Acorn and he was totally unaware of the tapes exposing the extent of the organization’s criminal character.
Maybe Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Gibson, et al aren’t as nefarious as we believe but just incredibly uninformed? Nah, they’re just arrogantly nefarious.
» Charlie Gibson on ACORN Scandal ‘I don’t even know about it.’
—
However, in an interview with Katie Couric, Charlie asserted that he can see an Oak Tree from his back porch.
Remember how Microsoft bought Hotmail, Facebook, Yahoo, Google etc? I think this is the pattern we will see with oldline media buying out independent blogs. Much as Soros funded Media Matters, or when the Wonkette brand was sold.
Maybe Gibson’s already mentally out of there?
These are not the observations of a trained professional or even a disciplined person, just a layman’s thoughts. The influence of the Internet is substantial and growing. Powers that be will seek to subdue it in order to maintain their power or increase it. Expect some subterfuge, some trap, some plan to develop to co-opt it’s voices, to select the winners in the blog wars. Perhaps it will be the same offer we have seen before, that for a small fee you too can have access to the halls of power. CNN made that deal with Saddam, if you recall. In return for access it agreed not to report on certain things.
Another feature of the plan would be lots of disinformation and lies planted on the Internet for the purpose of repudiating it, along with all the other disinformation and lies and innacuracies found on the Internet. (As a countermeasure, a reputable blog might decide it’s time to put up a set of comments guidelines). Perhaps some legislation is passed that mandates censoring, information filtering, for our own good. Those that are selected to win encounter a playing field where over the long run the approved side wins. I would expect some such plot to develop when the alternative is for the powers that be to lose control of the message.
On the other hand, I’m not so sanguine about all the crap we put on the Internet. Different disciplines have their own authorities, much of those authorities are bypassed because of a lack of trust or bad intent. Without some trust in some authority we cannot build anything of lasting good.
I still miss the NY Sun.
We do need editors in life. That is why God created women. What we don’t need are multi million dollar anchors.
In the future publishers will be aggregators of independent agents. They can buy a feed from Michael Yon in the back of beyond or from two plucky kids in the Acorn sewer next door. The next week someone else will get to hire the talent. This model could resemble at its worst what happened to the film industry after the studio system collapsed and projects became the creation of a web of agents and independent craftsmen with the old studios becoming distributors. The cost of distribution however is falling even faster now and the costs of production are also declining so as to eliminate any role for a Miramax of internet news. The limiting factor is in fact the time available for the consumer. That is why credibility is important. The producer/publisher/aggregator may hire editors to enhance their products prestige and rise above Drudge level in reputation. That will be a market decision. If Tom Brokaw wants the job of reading and evaluating clippings for his boss’s newsletter then he could apply. The job will probably pay around $12/hr. In fact it sounds like the job Barack Obama had after college.
As for Brokaw, who cares? I count him as one of those whose time has faded. They want to control the narrative in a time when the narrative will not be controlled…….. and they do not or refuse to understand that simple thing.
Friedman once did good geopolitics based on the ME. Now he is seemingly believing his own press releases and has forgotten how to do the simple things. Complexity has caught up with him and found that he is not capable of grasping it.
wretchard @ 18:
That is easy to answer. Back when I was looking for answers during times that scared the crap out of me, I found good reasoned arguments and good discussions about why those arguments were true.
E. Nigma @ 20:
I found in my corner of the world that the news from any of the local TV or radio stations could be gleened from the first 3 or 4 pages of the local fishwrapper. I quit watching them because I can read it for myself.
SIGINT @ 39:
There are really two levels to McLuhan and his message. One way we put it was “the media is the massage”. There is a spectrum of hot to cool. Hot media engage the imagination. Cool media do not. Print is hot. TV is cool. It is a spectrum of engagement of the media user. I am not sure where the internet fits in here. Lukewarm?
Two words.
Dan. Rather.
It’s not the making of the news, it’s the making UP of the news. Friedman and Brokaw can talk about the internet being an open sewer filled with trash but they are part of that. We need to vet what we read or hear? Fine, we need to vet what they say also.
I used to have subscribtions to Time and Newsweek and I read the NYTimes for decades. No more. When I occasionally go to the Newsweek and Time web sites what I see is leftist political polemics passed off as news articles. The Times is generally better in that it mainly confines its opinions to the editorial and op-ed pages. But I can hardly stomach their editorials or op-eds these days. I like the dining section though. I don’t feel the need to vet Mark Bittman’s recipes.
Maybe it’s all whose ox is being gored but these guys don’t seem to see the writing on the wall.
Latest ACORN Video:
ACORN San Bernardino Child Prostitution Investigation Part I
This section of the article floored me:
” * In 1963 CBS executive Fred Friendly and CBS commentator Eric Sevareid convince Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater to sit for a two-hour interview for a proposed CBS documentary called “The Conservative Revival.” Goldwater, wary that CBS was possessed of something he called “liberal bias,” hesitated. But persuaded that Friendly and Sevareid were, in Goldwater’s words, “gentlemen and men of their word,” he went ahead with the interview.
The result? A show called “Thunder on the Right,” which focused on the John Birch Society, the Minutemen and, as Goldwater later delicately noted, other “far-right activists.” Which is to say, crazies. A thoughtful profile of the likes of William F. Buckley, Jr. this show was not.
Goldwater appeared on screen only briefly, just long enough to link him with the Birchers, a group with which he had not only no connection but had actively opposed. Said a burned Goldwater afterwards: “In view of their conduct, I would never again accept the word of Friendly or Sevareid.”
* The year after JFK’s murder, a beautiful young woman named Mary Meyer, the wife separated from CIA official Cord Meyer, is found shot to death along a canal towpath in Georgetown. She is the sister-in-law of JFK’s close friend Ben Bradlee, then the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek, later famous as the executive editor of the Washington Post during Watergate.
In the middle of this tragedy, Mr. Bradlee discovers an official from the CIA in his murdered sister-in-law’s home rummaging through her belongings. It happens a second time. Then Mr. Bradlee discovers the object sought by the CIA — Ms. Meyer’s secret diary.
The diary tells the startling tale of 20-30 get-togethers for sex with Bradlee’s friend President Kennedy, where the two had occasion to smoke marijuana in between trysts. In the White House.
Mr. Bradlee is stunned his buddy the president was sleeping with his own sister-in-law. He had no idea. Fair enough. But his reaction once he knew? To do his best to see that this explosive news story never sees the light of day, with the diary destroyed.
In fact, the story does surface — years later when a source who had seen the diary tips off the National Enquirer — the National Enquirer! — and Mr. Bradlee ‘fesses up, very disturbed the story is out. He admits that, well, yes — the story is true. Every word of it.
Coverage at the time any of this actually happened — which is to say the eve of the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater election? A point, you surely would agree, when Americans needed information to make what, in your words, would have been an “informed decision” on the Kennedy-Johnson administration record and also that of the Democratic candidate for Senator from New York — Robert Kennedy. Zero. Why? The story was in Bradlee’s hands — the hands of the Washington bureau chief for one of the most influential newsmagazines of the day — and, said he later: “I never for a minute considered reporting the discovery of the diary and its contents.
* On the verge of being nominated for president on the Republican ticket, Senator Barry Goldwater is, says CBS journalist Daniel Schorr, heading to Germany for a vacation after the GOP Convention. Germany? Why Germany? The trip was, said reporter Schorr, “a move by Senator Goldwater to link up” with the far right-wing of German politics. Meaning, of course, the Nazis.
Goldwater would not only be consorting with these Nazis, he was scheduled to stay at Berchtesgaden, the infamous country estate of Adolf Hitler.
In fact, Goldwater had no such plans. None. Zero. Zip. But it was a vivid story that successfully added a few brush strokes to the portrait the media and his opponents sought to create (as in the CBS “Thunder on the Right” documentary) that Barry Goldwater was a far-right wing extremist, a nut case.
Said a still angry Goldwater decades later of the attempt to paint him as a Hitler-loving Nazi-sympathizer (Goldwater was a Major General in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and a World War Two veteran): “The CBS broadcast was false, and Schorr’s was the most irresponsible reporting I’ve witnessed in my life. The New York Times followed with an untrue account of its own.”
My God. They’re even FILTHIER than I thought. And I thought they stank already. WOW. Bradlee covered up the murder of his OWN SISTER IN LAW to protect JFK?
Fred Not-So Friendly LIBELLED Goldwater with a crude, balls-out hit piece? Daniel Schorr, another media pajandrum, just made shite up about Goldwater’s trip to Germany to make him out to be a NAZI?
I want to know what ELSE we’ve been monstrously lied to about all these years!! God only Knows what’s buried under the house!
(Sorry for all the caps, but I am LIVID.)
“When everyone has cellphone, everyone is a photographer. When everyone has access to YouTube, everyone is a film maker. And when everyone is a blogger, everyone is a newspaper. When everyone is a photographer, a newspaper and a film maker, everyone else is a public figure.”
Well, honey, y’all should never have let the uppity plebes learn how to read. That was your first mistake.
PS – Those who weave themselves into the fabric of the modern media consciousness are too weighing their own worth on the value of their information. What makes them players is how they choose to dispense that information, when, and for whom.
See the search string “wiki the fifth column” and the Meta tag results are: ‘A fifth column is a group of people who clandestinely undermine a larger group, such as a nation, from within, to the aid of an external enemy. …’
after the obligatory wrongly promoted info-item in the search stack.
I conflated the forth estate and the fifth column. It must have been Freudian or a Carlylean thing.
If the fifth column of the forth estate could self rectify by a distributed intelligence formed on networked information system, then I can’t wait to see what it does for democratic politics. It’s gonna be a doosey and the current stake holders are going to behave like… well, I guess they are going to behave like our political class is behaving right now; pretty self indulgent. We live in interesting times indeed.
The Rules Have Changed
Since NBC is mostly an open sewer, he means filtering that, right? But if you filtered for only the vetted truth, what would be left to say.
No thanks, I will take my chances, we don’t need the ‘Hugo Chavez’ news services for America.
What’s missing from the New York Times coverage of ACORN
If the traditional 4th estate is dead, in terms of its old constitution, how will the new media evolve its arrangements with the others powers that be? Wretchard at 11 above.
Good question indeed. The first barrier, still being negotiated, is the fact that the great mass of the lumpenproletariat still get their news from tabloid TV, tabloid papers, or other easy media grabs. The MSM still control those “fast food” outlets. Pyjamas TV and channels like it have some distance to go before they tip the balance. The great thing is that the knowing ones in the media know the game is slipping away, and that the rules are changing.
Doug,
Thanks for the Malkin link. Did a little commenting and copied the list of ACORN affiliates to my blog. As the list makes clear SEIU is part and parcel of this criminal conspiracy. RICO should be applied to them. In NY the worst thing George Pataki ever did is deal with Dennis Rivera of the SEIU. If this can get legislatures to forbid any expenditure of taxpayer dollars or contract relation with the SEIU then that would do two things.
1) It would be a massive blow against the criminal network.
2) It would be a massive shift in power from the judiciary to the legislature.
Obama was ACORN’s lawyer when they forced the banks to issue the CRA junk mortgages. He helped create the monster. He is, and should be, tied to them.
For those who ask how long this has been going on, remember that the Baltimore Sun reporter in Moscow knew about the starvation of the Kulaks in the Ukrain by Stalin and didn’t report it. He received a Pulitzer for his FRIENDLY coverage of Communist atrocities. The print media was progressive at least way back to the muck rakers of the 1880′s. Ida Tarbell did a number on old John D. much like others did on Goldwater.
The point is that as long as others filter whatever for you, you have lost power and they have gained it. You are captive to their opinions/positions, whatever they are. The Catholic church began to loose its monolpoly on power when Gutenber’s press allowed many to read the Bible for themselves. This media argument is just the latest skirmish in leveling the walls of power and breaking down the chains that bind us.
That’s a heck of a list, Lifeof.
Did “purplepeep” say how he came across it?
I would recommend that every high school require a class in news research only by the internet and to verify each story with a least 5 sources. Teaching students how to determine the truth of an issue/news story. This may require the class to follow the issue/story for several months as all the facts presents themselves.
“This media argument is just the latest skirmish in leveling the walls of power and breaking down the chains that bind us.”
—
Many’s the day the outcome seems to be certainly still in doubt.
MSM’s silence is deafening and deadly when they put their “heart” into it.
Doug,
He said it was from a Kos thread, so how can we doubt it? Getting the list of entities that used the New Orleans house as a mail drop shouldn’t have been to hard.
“too”
You’re welcome!
Signed,
Mr. Anal
Shi..y Litter Coverup
Here’s the latest excuse from a leftist rag that engages in media malpractice, only when shamed into giving one, due to their ideological inability to report on the Van Jones story:
“This is not an excuse,” the managing editor of The New York Times said after offering the following excuse for completely missing the Van Jones story, except in a blog post:
“Our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period.”
63 docbill: I think you hit something here.
We are not just an Army of Davids. We are now an Army of Martin Luthers, as well. With the access provided by the internet many of us actually have read the relavant documents, which the elites are trying to “interpret” for us.
Often it becomes evident that the elites have NOT read these same documents. Current legislation comes to mind as an example. I’m reasonably sure I’ve read more House Bills the last few months than my legislators. Their commentaries demonstrate their complete ignorance of legislative content (or is it their corruption and hmmm, lies?).
The self appointed elites are now being called on it. I personally look forward to this “Reformation”.
On 9-15-09, Charles Gibson (ABC) was on Don Wade & Roma, a local Chicago radio show, and they asked him what he thought about the ACORN/prostitution tapes and he said he didn’t know anything about it, never heard of it.
Like a bunch of 2-year-olds with their fingers in their ears, “I can’t hear you!!!” This was AFTER the Census Bureau announced it was no longer working with Acorn on 2010 Census, and AFTER the Senate voted 83-7 to defund ACORN in the pending HUD/Trans approp bill, and another State (FL, I think) says its gonna file voter registration fraud charges. So it’s “real” gov’t news, not ‘just’ Fox and Breitbart. But he’s never even heard of it? Not that ABC News made a decision not to cover it due to lack of time or whatever, but it doesn’t exist.
The same guy who looked down his nose (literally) at Palin when she asked for clarification of a very ambiguous and poorly formed “gotcha” question.
Last night, O’Reilly had a graphic on the number of times each major TV news network had run any story mentioning ACORN since last year—may be on his website, but the numbers were (CNN is approx., the others are exactly what he showed):
Fox News 322
CNN 60
MSNBC 10
ABC 2
NBC 2
CBS 1
Incompetent, stupid or dishonest? Why not all 3?
Says it all, doesn’t it? Not to mention, how the hell does someone who gets their news from the 3 bigs make any sense of the actual news of the day? It must all seem just random. Van Jones, a WH CZAR, leaves the administration before we even know who he is, let alone that there’s a controversy? Census Bureau cuts off ACORN, Senate votes to defund them, and we don’t even know who or what ACORN is, let alone that they had a relationship with the Census and got Federal money, or that they were in any way controversial? WTF???
There are some viable economic models out there: the Wall Street Journal charges an arm for the print edition or a leg for online, but the content is worth it. Community weeklies do OK in lots of places, with advertising and news at a local scale that is worth paying for, but would never work as a daily. Internet-only might work, if the content justifies it and you could keep unpaid links out. Some are trying it (Seattle Post-Intelligencer comes to mind).
What these all have in common is the content has to be worth paying for. Something that I would guess Brokaw and Friedman cannot and will never comprehend as a valid test.
The larger issue that Wretchard raises, the sociology, if you will, of the connection between the news media and power, will have to work itself out. For now, it seesm to be more a celebrity culture, where Bono and Oprah and others who can deliver an audience and/or raise a lot of $$$s are more “inside” than the news people, who I’m sure tresent it deeply, but why should anyone care about them?
No more James Reston or Arthur Krock or the Alsops. boo-hoo. No more covering up JFK as a serial philanderer who was addicted to pain killers and whose Addison’s Disease was almost out of control.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, the main thing we can do is get out of the way so the dinosaurs can die off and make ecological space for tomorrow’s birds and mammals.
Four words for you, Mr. Brokaw.
Can’t stop the signal.
The Brokaw works in their mind when the Republicans have some hand on power… then they can investigate, shape and relate “context” to news about Republicans. Then the press is being a “watchdog” for the rest of us. The “model” becomes demonstrably broken when the Dems have both the White House and significant majorities in Congress – then they have nothing to be opposed to and nothing to report, they can only cheerlead. They can’t even report intra-party squabbles as that would weaken the whole facade.
Mr. Aaron beat me to it – the Internet is leading to a new Reformation.
Before the printing press, the Bible was hand-written and read by only a very few in the Catholic Church. The Church then intepreted the words there and issued dogma through its huge organization.
Along comes the printing press and the original theology of the Bible is available to much larger audiences. Martin Luther translates it from a dead language, Latin, into venacular German. Suddenly the dogma doesn’t seem so compelling anymore and the power of the Church is deminished.
The result was the 30 Years War in Germany and similar in other countries.
The idea of a contemporary Cold Civil War returns…..
No one from NBC News should ever try to bolster his organization’s credibility by analogy to the information “you have to test before buying an automobile.”
In the late 1970′s when I was starting as a freelancer and investigating the option of financing a new business with an SBA loan, one of the people in SBA mentioned to me that Tom Brokaw had gotten a substantial SBA funding because of his Native American background.
I tried calling his organization because my family had native American ancestors, and my spouse had a full-blooded Oglala grandparent.
I never have been able to determine whether this was a bunch of bushwa, or what. Wiki biography doesn’t say squat about any “native American” connection, so I’m guessing the person who talked to me must have had a close up view of his own large intestine.
Aaron, Whitehall.
Luther’s Reformation was, in the long run, a good thing, but it didn’t go far enough. The Catholic Church fought for their existance and many died, but the pagan traditions that had crept into “the Church” by the 15th century are still with us and many more have been added since.
Most Christians do not/cannot relate to the God of the Bible because of the filter the Church has given them look through. This is what Jesus was trying to warn about in his Matthew 23 tirade. Everything he warns us about is being practiced today by the leaders of the Catholic Church. Protestant Churches are very little better.
Now, just as Christians are deceived by the very leaders of the churches they attend, so too are many sheeple deceived by the same “news” men they rely on to reinforce a worldview that leads to lives of slavery.
I love this, and I hope we have more of these types of statements from Brokaw and others.
The media ia losing credibility every day, and not just in the eyes of the more involved citizens.
I love my wife to death, but she’s not political, and gets her news from the national broadcasts on CBS, ABC, or NBC. The same goes for most of her family. I’ve mentioned in the past how ridiculous these organizations have become, and she’s listened to me patiently, and then discounted my observations as she knows I’m a political animal with biases of my own. Very wise on her part.
The 9/12 march has opened her eyes. I waited for a couple of days, and then asked her if she’d heard about it. The answer was no, even though she watched the news in that period. Then I showed her the pictures on the Internet, and it was very clear to her that this was an important event that had not been covered as it should have been (in fact, hardly covered at all).
I then pointed out that the small story in our local paper was on page A17. It was obvious to her that it should have been on page 1, above the fold. Or at least it would have been if the “news”paper had any thought of telling people what was really happening. You know, the news.
All of the sudden, she is in agreement with me regarding the news media. In her eyes, the lack of coverage of this very major event was indefensible by any organization that claimed to present the news. She no longer trusts them at all. Score one more for the opposition!
The Brokaws of the world are clueless. It’s been their way for so long that they can’t envision any other way. They really seem to believe that they can continue to ignore or downplay stories that don’t fit their narrative, and that the people won’t notice. I hope they continue in this vein. If nothing else, it provides some cheap entertainment for the rest of us.
Something that relates to the interface between the new and old media. I have run across this in other sites. We have had, since the 2008 primary season, an infestation of Leftist trolls across the internet. It got to the point where on some sites we knew their schedules and days off and would yank their chains about when they were going off duty, and when their shift change replacement [and who it would be] would come on duty.
ACORN is in the midst of a “shut down” as an “Independent Review” [composed of their Board members and a Soros appointee] gives them a clean bill of health [there will be another video out tonight!]. It has been noted on other sites that troll activity has plummetted coincidental with the shut down. Coincidence?
The next question, that the PJ staff might want to look at, is have the hacking attacks dropped off in the same time frame?
Subotai Bahadur