It’s like we need someone loud yet gentle who doesn’t care about his popularity (or infamy) to get onto media and just freaking talk PAST the reporter questions directly to the American people and let them know what is REALLY going on.
I'm not much of a YouTube surfer, but I got on there and did some surfing the other night out of sheer boredom, and I was amazed at all of the ordinary citizens who are posting videos and speaking their minds about the current U.S. situation.
Name a subject that we talk about here, and I can guarantee you there are dozens of videos with people expressing views like ours, there on that site.
Just finding that all this explosive communication is happening there, gave me a bit of comfort. I know that the young low infos who don't listen to Rush, and who would never even think to look for a place like FR, are absorbing the same logic and reasoning from that channel.
If we really want to get through to the low infos, that's the place to do it. It's where their eyeballs are.
I agree! It makes me happy to hear that people are on YouTube explaining things and voicing conservative opinion. That is where we need to be.
I am always heartened by trending Obama jokes on twitter, to see (via their photos when they have them) young people, of all races, joining the joke fest with jokes with that grain of truth in them, meaning they get it.
The greatest lesson I learned during my time at Off-road.com regarding media/communication was this. If you don’t see something you want/need, go make it.
We were fortunate to be in a time when it was all new to the world. However we were also at a disadvantage in that the conventional wisdom/mindset was that the net was a kids video game not to be taken seriously.
Our competition was never other websites but the magazines like Four Wheeler, Off-Road, Petersons 4-Wheel and Off-Road and some of the smaller ones. In the beginning when we did event coverage, the sanctioning bodies like SCORE gave all the access etc to the mags since they were established. Within 2 years the mags were bitching that we were undercutting them and had the knives out.
My point is this. We mock the amateur hour BS of the MSM and for good reason. But no one ever thinks it all the way through. They act like amateur hour because they ARE matures today. The long held ‘crusading reporter’ meme is a thing of the past in the MSM because a reporter is nothing more than a press agent for a combo of the publisher, the advertizers and the power brokers pulling the strings.
No reporter will write SQUAT without a litany of authorizations/approvals from those above them. It works that way in small town papers, regionals and the big outlets. And I know this from personal experience. Any of the several current/former reporters here on FR will attest to this. Sure, they get leeway on puff pieces that can do little harm, yet even there, there are plenty of ‘guidelines’ so as to NEVER upset anyone. There is NO leeway on political pieces. There is a script and a predetermined outcome.
Now of course Windy, and we have talked about it, Palin and her little facebook page have done what no MSM outlet can. But people are so locked in to the idea that “Oh we are screwed because of the media. Sure. They still have power to cause holy hell.
Sooooooo....take it from them like we did. We had exactly 1 ‘real journalist’ when ORC began. Rick Sieman, former Ed of Dirt Bike Magazine. And he was mostly our mentor (and thank God for him). But a handfull of us went up against our little corner of the industry and succeeded wildly without ‘official’ approval and outside ‘accepted channels’.
Today all the Youtube videos and serious blogs are an immense groundwork. What they need to be is a network. Because they dwarf the size of the MSM. They reach more people more directly than the MSM and to be straight up honest, even the most questionable of blogs is more TRUSTED...BY FAR than the MSM.
You bring those entities together, even marginally in coordinated effort and you put an unrecoverable hurt on the MSM, strip them of their power and win.
All one needs to do is observe the effort that certain groups put into marginalizing the very idea that the proverbial grassroots could use such a vehicle to cut out the media, to see what the media fear most: Direct and unfiltered access between unapproved messengers and the people who pay the MSM’s bills.
Because if they are bypassed, their and the lib power structure is stripped of the power it now enjoys.
So why isn’t it happening? The same mentality that got us Presidential candidates like Romney. Too much work. Lets just go with the lesser evil ‘placeholder’ till someone better comes along ‘next time’.