"Taken at face value, most of the video is plausible and scary. Without gatekeepers, no one stands ready to verify reports as accurate, so there is no difference between real news and agreed-upon gossip or low-level fluff."
And this is different from the NY Times making up stories because.....
(listens to the crickets chirping while waiting for an answer)
But what if those gatekeepers pass out forged memos as "fake but accurate".
We're all going to have to rethink how we deal with the Internet. As exciting as these new developments are, there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function... ." Hillary Rodham Clinton, February 11, 1998
"The New York Times has become a newsletter read only by the elite and the elderly..."
...meanwhile Free Republic celebrates its 28th birthday.
"The New York Times has become a newsletter read only by the elite and the elderly..."
You mean, read only by the pretentious and ugly, don't you?
Actually, newsletters are the state of the art, ranging from bad to the genre of these times. The art of communications is newsletters, email, electronic posting/blogs. The newspaper was the state of the art in the nineteenth century, got displaced by television and radio in the twentieth century, and are still trying to convince themselves that history always repeats itself and they will be the Next Big Thing -- so hang on to your shares and jobs at your local newspaper.
Meanwhile, history and life has passed them by. Diligent monitors of literature on all the media will note that perusing the mass media for valuable information becomes less productive with each passing day. Most of it is just things you don't need to know and are just wasting your time.
The real communications and information is coming increasingly from the newsletters, emails, postings, blogs. The quality depends on what your personal network is. The mass media has monopolized a market people are questioning whether it has any value at all. Is there still a major mover or thinker in their readership after they've suppressed all the voices but their own? -- and judging from their letters to the editor, they're still searching for signs of intelligent life. They drove off the intelligent readers to these emerging alternative forums which was the predictable stupid mistake.
By insisting that they had to be on top of the pecking order, they had to shrink the pond so small, that it became a puddle against the vast background of an ocean of information that they could not control. They set the rules, but everybody else decided not to play their game. Their confusion and anomie is palpable.