Posted on 03/09/2005 9:11:20 AM PST by srm913
When Dan Rather signs off tonight, ending 24 years as anchor of the "CBS Evening News," it will mark a changing of the guard in more ways than one.
Yes, CBS will need a new anchor. (Bob Schieffer will fill in until a permanent replacement is named.)
But Rather's departure also symbolizes the rise of a new player in the world of media and politics that was not even a glimmer in a science-fiction writer's imagination when Rather first took the anchor's chair: the Internet phenomenon known as the blogosphere.
Blogs, especially the Twin Cities-based Power Line, may have helped hasten Rather's retirement by eviscerating documents on which Rather relied for a story about President Bush's National Guard service.
Blogs played a significant role in the 2004 U.S. Senate race in which South Dakota Republican John Thune unseated Tom Daschle, then the Democratic leader of the Senate. Some have worried that blogs are contributing to the polarization of American politics, but a recent study of Internet users suggested otherwise.
Some blogs have embraced a role of influencing traditional media coverage. A prominent blogger recently proposed that conservatives should scrutinize the Star Tribune in a bloggish tactic called "swarming," which is what happened to Rather after his Bush National Guard story.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Sorry, MSM, but we DON'T like echo chambers. You might want to consider a little trifle in the Constitution called FREE SPEECH.
WELL, we can't have THAT, now, can we?
Couldn't help but laugh at this. They're skurred.
As opposed to a steady diet of news and views that coincide with the MSM's preferences!
The MSM is absolutely running scared on this and will seek any means possible to maintain their strangle hold on what information gets disseminated to the public at large.
What we are all currently engaged in (but few really seem to understand) "Information Warfare" and the stakes huge!!
This is very true. For many years, Daschle had a lock on the press. His own constituents never heard his true views on abortion. He was pro-choice in town and pro-life in the country. But the blogs ended that. Finally, after being left behind, his hometown paper asked him point-blank if he would "call himself pro-abortion." He said no and it was a death spiral from that point on as the blogs produced his own writings against him.
And God bless the South Dakota voters for flicking that arthropod away.
But it's a lot easier and cheaper to read several different sources over the internet than it is to read several physical newspapers.
Let's get to the bottom line.
The fact is that with the increase in people on the internet, and the ease of looking up FACTUAL DOCUMENTATION on just about any subject you can name, and being able to refer to the previous statements made by public figures,
The PUBLIC is able to VERIFY the truth for themselves.
The PUBLIC is NO LONGER at the mercy of the MSM and POLITICIANS who WILL and HAVE LIED to feed their lust for WEALTH and POWER.
You are DAMN RIGHT it scares them. Scares the HELL out of them. They depended on the SHORT TERM MEMORY of most of the American Public.
When I heard he'd been booted out I did a little dance.
(talk about your distrubing image)
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