it looks like one hundred years from now history may record that 2005 was the year that big (news) media gave way to the individual voice. the intersection of the ny times/judy miller debacle with the increasing influence of the blogosphere has made us conscious of the major change taking place — RIGHT NOW.
congressman john conyers wrote today that “I find I learn more reading Arianna, Murray Waas and Lawrence O’Donnell than the New York Times or Washington Post.”
wow!
if:book
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I’ve noticed that more and more I use printed matter (newspapers, brochures, mailings, magazines) as mere springboards to the Internet.
I don’t necessarily go to blogs, but many times the sites I visit take me to them.
Long ago I’ve ceased trusting media, especially in America. As a downtowner I used to read the Voice, not the Times. Even though I always detected a certain provincialism in the Voice, its “village” character, before the Internet it was the most complete cultural guide for my taste. Today, I read the Times because it is, indeed, a well-written newspaper, not because it’s an
unbiased one. But, can you show me one that isn’t? As I told you the other day, I feel that journalists, specially emerging ones, are confined, or confine themselves, to certain
aspects/tendencies/issues, to the point that they lose perspective. They’re unable to crossover. That’s many times a frustration of mine when I read a cultural review and, trusting my taste
–after all it’s what I like what matters to me, go an see or listen something and discover that they’d missed the whole point. Other times, reviews are pretty much the run-of-the-mill retelling of the plot, adorned with a few platitudes. Of course, there are also inspiring, wonderful ones. Not the norm, though.
After the Jayson Blair fiasco we grew more suspicious of the Times, their public mea culpa clearly blamed Blair. He was a plagiarist,
and had fabricated parts of his stories, but he wasn’t a buddy-buddy with people in high places neither at the Times nor in the Bush’s administration reporting on the reasons that took
this country to war! This one infuriates me.
Thinking in retrospective, what would have been of us in the days of the invasion to Iraq without the blogs coming out of there? What would be of us today, without the possibility of reaching out to the web for more information, for other view points? Perhaps, your point about the importance of the blogging community in the shaping of how we see the world lies upon the fact that freedom of speech actually exists out there. The myriad of voices resounding in the web doesn’t necessarily have an editor, and that gives them the possibility to exist. However, sorting them out continues to be the reader’s job. An increasingly tough one.