Speaking at an event at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston last February, Kerry complained about us and the thousands of others in Internet news. What he said is shocking only if you believe Kerry's words could ever put this new information age back in the bottle.
"We learned," Kerry said to the gathering, "that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"
What Senator Kerry would like to do about it is to shut us all up. But he can't say that publicly. What he did say publicly, though, is just as shocking. "When fear is dominating the discussion and when there are false choices presented and there is no arbitrator, we have a problem," said Kerry.
In case you missed that, Kerry says the problem is the lack of an arbitrator to control the dissemination of news. He did not say who or what that arbitrator should be, only that we have a problem because there is not one.
The "sub-media" is a problem for Kerry because the mainstream media is no longer in control to silence groups like the Swift Boat Vets by ignoring them and denying them coverage. Or to keep stories quiet like we chronicled about Kerry's lead in outsourcing trade missions to China in the late 1990's in conjunction with a Boston company boasting over 70 outsourcing projects - at the same time we were reporting on this, his preferred news disseminators were dutifully printing Kerry's campaign speeches calling for an end to outsourcing without a word of Kerry's involvement in the very thing he was speaking against.
Surely the problem Kerry sees is that stories run by Dan Rather, The New York Times and the other media giants favorable to him are being knocked down as false by internet newsgroups calling themselves FreeRepublic, Powerline, and Little Green Footballs.
BINGO