The greatest lesson I learned during my time at Off-road.com regarding media/communication was this. If you don’t see something you want/need, go make it.
We were fortunate to be in a time when it was all new to the world. However we were also at a disadvantage in that the conventional wisdom/mindset was that the net was a kids video game not to be taken seriously.
Our competition was never other websites but the magazines like Four Wheeler, Off-Road, Petersons 4-Wheel and Off-Road and some of the smaller ones. In the beginning when we did event coverage, the sanctioning bodies like SCORE gave all the access etc to the mags since they were established. Within 2 years the mags were bitching that we were undercutting them and had the knives out.
My point is this. We mock the amateur hour BS of the MSM and for good reason. But no one ever thinks it all the way through. They act like amateur hour because they ARE matures today. The long held ‘crusading reporter’ meme is a thing of the past in the MSM because a reporter is nothing more than a press agent for a combo of the publisher, the advertizers and the power brokers pulling the strings.
No reporter will write SQUAT without a litany of authorizations/approvals from those above them. It works that way in small town papers, regionals and the big outlets. And I know this from personal experience. Any of the several current/former reporters here on FR will attest to this. Sure, they get leeway on puff pieces that can do little harm, yet even there, there are plenty of ‘guidelines’ so as to NEVER upset anyone. There is NO leeway on political pieces. There is a script and a predetermined outcome.
Now of course Windy, and we have talked about it, Palin and her little facebook page have done what no MSM outlet can. But people are so locked in to the idea that “Oh we are screwed because of the media. Sure. They still have power to cause holy hell.
Sooooooo....take it from them like we did. We had exactly 1 ‘real journalist’ when ORC began. Rick Sieman, former Ed of Dirt Bike Magazine. And he was mostly our mentor (and thank God for him). But a handfull of us went up against our little corner of the industry and succeeded wildly without ‘official’ approval and outside ‘accepted channels’.
Today all the Youtube videos and serious blogs are an immense groundwork. What they need to be is a network. Because they dwarf the size of the MSM. They reach more people more directly than the MSM and to be straight up honest, even the most questionable of blogs is more TRUSTED...BY FAR than the MSM.
You bring those entities together, even marginally in coordinated effort and you put an unrecoverable hurt on the MSM, strip them of their power and win.
All one needs to do is observe the effort that certain groups put into marginalizing the very idea that the proverbial grassroots could use such a vehicle to cut out the media, to see what the media fear most: Direct and unfiltered access between unapproved messengers and the people who pay the MSM’s bills.
Because if they are bypassed, their and the lib power structure is stripped of the power it now enjoys.
So why isn’t it happening? The same mentality that got us Presidential candidates like Romney. Too much work. Lets just go with the lesser evil ‘placeholder’ till someone better comes along ‘next time’.
There's food for much thought in your comment. This is not a light thing we're talking about here. Essentially, it's the power to transmit and communicate ideas to great numbers of people. Ideas are the deadliest things known to despots of every era. In every age, they have sought to control the flow of information and ideas amongst those they wish to subjugate. It still goes on today in the compromised, subverted, state-run press.
It can be seen, though, that prior to the fall of every despotic regime, there was an eruption of the free flow of ideas and information amongst the people. The emancipation of ideas and communication always precedes the formation of the collective will of a people to emancipate themselves.
Where a tyrant wins in crushing such budding emancipation movements, is when they become too centralized into readily identifiable units. This is why newspapers and television networks were so easily captured by the agents of oppression, then turned into zombie mouth organs for the oligarchy. They're fixed in place and staffed with a fixed set of operators.
YouTube posters, bloggers, and anonymous comment warriors are harder to identify, locate, and pin down. When they are, it does little good, because there are thousands more where they came from. There just aren't enough agents and resources to control them all.
A lot has been written about the democratizing character of the internet, and it's true. Because of this technology, the power of the press is now in everyone's hands. And because so many are choosing to take advantage of that power, the fusillade of ideas, information, and communication, is coming from virtually everywhere. And nowhere......which is the inherent beauty in it.
I think Sun Tzu would caution us about attempting to build solid networks among bloggers, videographers, and comment warriors. I believe he would advise us to create connections that are like the wind. The enemy can feel them. They have real force, pressure, and direction, but he can't locate them, or wrap his fist around them to fix them in place and control them.