Well done. Can you imagine what the narrative would be like had this happened before the Internet? If all we had were the Big 3 to get us information?
101ORD makes a great point. The dissemination of information used to be the nearly sole province of "Big Media".
Freeper conservatism_is_compassion has contributed some great commentary over the years on this subject, the bottom line being that there has NEVER been objective media, it is a myth.
The individual elements of the media would figure out what the message was, package the information into a format that would convey that message most effectively, and distribute it. It wasn't a monolithic enterprise where they were all faxing the talking points to each other, but when they all share pretty much the same world view, that didn't have to happen. The message would be uniform enough.
Uniform enough, then when they would begin reading, watching and listening to each other, they would plagiarize words and phrases to the point where it sounds like an echo chamber. Rush Limbaugh does an interesting exercise where he takes sound bites from various news outlets and makes a collage, and the effect is both hilarious and sobering at the same time. Of particular note was the media's use of the word "gravitas" to describe George W. Bush. While I (and many others) understood the meaning of the word, it is both a word rarely used in conversation and heard and read even less in the media. However, once it was used, it began to bounce around to the point it was ricocheting all over the place, the effect like putting dye in tanks of fluid to see if they are leaking into each other and finding out the leaks are pervasive and saturating because all the tanks are the same color in a short period of time.
For me, a real turning point was when I saw the documentary narrated by Charlton Heston:
Vietnam War - The Impact of Media
It wasn't that I didn't know this, I just hadn't paid much attention or focused on it. But it crystallized for me for good when I saw this. (If you haven't seen this, I suggest you watch...everything you have seen in the media regarding our military since 2003 makes complete sense.
In particular, the video discusses the treatment of the Tet Offensive by the media in 1968. It is shameful, yet fascinating, like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
But we were a captive audience. And many people, no, MOST people trusted the media. They TRUSTED people like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather to tell us the truth, and assumed they did so. It was only with the passage of time that we could look dispassionately on that time, and realize just what took place.
The Internet has changed all that. Personally, I have not read a newspaper, read a magazine (such as Time or Newsweek) or watched a full news broadcast in nearly a decade. I consider myself far better informed than the majority of people I know.
But that comes with a price. With that freedom of not being beholden to Big Media comes responsibility...the responsibility of having to vet information myself and not depend on someone else (such as ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, LA Times, Boston Globe, etc.) to do it for me. And this is sometimes not only difficult to do, it is occasionally impossible to do, and I am left with having to make a best guess. And not being infallible, I make mistakes in judgement.
This is where a site like Free Republic becomes invaluable. Here, there can be generally open discussion about an issue. Many different people can view the available evidence and with a multitude of perspectives (some useful and some not so useful) an issue can be attacked piecemeal and broken down, much like a bunch of people with hammers and chisels working on a gigantic boulder.
I have found that on FR, any opinion or theory, no matter how crackpot or politically incorrect, can be promoted by a poster. However, I have also found that if you have a point of view, it is not going to be simply accepted as another valid theory, but can and WILL be deconstructed by participants. It is done with experience, humor, anger, insight, ignorance, bias, prejudice and wisdom. What results is, if not a good handle on an issue, is a wider perspective on that issue.
We saw that with the Dan Rather issue.
And I think we are doing that now with the Trayvon Martin shooting. We have all been into dozens of threads on this, and have seen the gamut of opinions and wide disagreement on everything from the general philosophy of the situation down to the minute details such as the condition of the weapon after it fired.
It is both critically useful and maddeningly frustrating to approach the issues this way, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Thank God for this forum.