Bloggers: Fade or Flourish?
As I was perusing the updated conservative/liberal ratings of U.S. Senators and Representatives, I stumbled across yet another journalist miffed about the bloggers success.
Williams Powers’s piece in the latest issue of National Journal at first-glance reads as if Powers approves of bloggers but actually is a stealth-attack masked as favorable parlance. Powers indeliably praises the bloggers (e.g., for the takedown of CNN executive Eason Jordan), however, he describes the result as “wicked.” Also, Powers is mistaken in claiming the MSM was centrist! before the bloggers arrival:
The current momentis troubling for a lot of people precisely because it’s so cannibalistic. In the last half of the 20th century, the media consolidated a great deal of power for themselves in a tiny tribe of supreme outlets. Since those outlets had strong tendencies toward the center (because that’s where the big audiences and the money are), it was inevitable that a lot of news consumer –those who aren’t so centrist –would be unhappy with the product.
Calling the MSM centrist is a joke. I wonder who he believes is centrist: The New York Times? The Washington Post?
Powers reasons that because only the MSM can perform “the heavy journalistic lifting” necessary to vet out the truth or produce real news, bloggers will soon fade away into obscurity.
Powers is wrong. He appears, from his clever but substance-less writing, that he is one of those snob journalists who feels that one needs a degree in journalism or a job at a MSM outlet to be taken seriously.
As the Eason Jordan scenario (among others) illustrates: Bloggers are staying and Journalists now have some competition. How sad, Mr. Powers. How sad indeed.