American enemy....
Steve Boriss teaches the class “The Future of News” at Washington University in St. Louis and is a principal of The Future of News, Inc.Boriss' work is extremely significant IMHO. Hat tip to Milhous
My vanity, The Right to Know, has a similar thrust to it.
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As always - excellent read. So many generations influenced and taught by a one-thought source.
Big Brother has been with us a long time.
The more one reads about him, the more one realizes that there were at least two Jeffersons, the public Jefferson who is today always quoted as a paragon of one thing or another and the private Jefferson who bought newspaper publishers to slander his opponents and sneakily put the knife into the backs of more than one of his fellow Founders.
Essentially, our newspapers now refuse to compete with each other on the basis of news stories or news angles. In most cases they docilely and unquestioningly reprint wire material provided by the AP and fellow members, like The New York Times and Washington Post. While there is regular news coverage about the potential damage caused by “Big Oil,” Big Tobacco,” and “Big Pharmaceutical,” we hear nothing about the damage done to Jefferson’s vision for a freewheeling marketplace of ideas by what the AP network of newspapers has created — “Big News”
. . . or, as I have been calling it, "Big Journalism."The monopolistic nature of the Associated Press is what unifies the voice of journalism. Independent editorial pages don't amount to much when the whole rest of the paper reeks of the same perspective - the perspective that cheap, second guessing talk is more honorable than action. No wonder Big Journalism is so hostile to physical accomplishment! All journalists have to do is talk, and award themselves credit for their good intentions. The businessman or the cop or the soldier has to act on the basis of limited knowledge of the results of his action because by the time he knows fully - if indeed he ever can, without trying it and finding out what happens - it will be too late to do much good.
Our culture has been saturated for a century and a half with propaganda to the effect that the news is important. Placing that much emphasis on the new inevitably denigrates what is not new. Not only so, but by promoting the new so intensively, journalism creates the presumption that they will in fact deliver the news as quickly as possible - but experience shows that that is only true of news which fits Big Journalism's template. For example, during election night 2000 the news of Gore victories in various states came notably more quickly than news of Bush victories did - the margin of victory and thus, presumptively, the time required to obtain a reliable indication of the result - being the same. To such an extent that, most famously, Big Journalism called Florida a victory for the wrong man, before all the polls in Florida were even closed. Had victories for Bush been called as rapidly as those for Gore were, voters on the West Coast would have been treated to the news that Gore had lost his home state of Tennessee and Clinton's home state of Arkansas before the polls were closed in California.
The Federal Election Commission presently lacks a quorum because the Senate will not act on a Bush nominee. The Majority Leader initially claimed that the reason for holding up his nomination was because the nominee favored Voter ID laws. However, the Supreme Court has vindicated that position in the Indiana case, so that is not the reason for the hold - which has practical financial implications for the McCain presidential campaign in the here and now. I question why that is not grounds for a plea to SCOTUS for relief from McCain-Feingold - if not indeed for "Campaign Finance Reform" generally. Of course we know that McCain himself, self-righteous prig that he is, will not pursue such an action. But is it actually true that the candidate is the only one harmed when people who wish to express their approval of a candidate - or disapproval of his opponent - are deprived of the right to do so to an extent limited only by their own purse, rather than by the arbitrary diktat of the government?
Given the present makeup of the Supreme Court, it would certainly seem that there would be cause for civil action against the Associated Press and Big Journalism somewhere in all of that!
With the modern public Internet, cable and satellite TV and satellite radio, the world of de-massified media started to become reality between 1995 and 2001. It is of my opinion that the Internet really started to explode in 1995 with the release of Windows 95, since Windows 95 included the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) stack very necessary to connect to the Internet from a home computer through a telephone modem, DSL modem or cable modem. Before Windows 95, you had to install a third-party software to get Internet access, something a lot of users did not want to do.
American enemy....
And now the Internet has, pretty much at a stroke, begun the elimination of all those problems and a return to Jefferson’s vision.