The Old Gray Lady, She Ain't What She Used to Be

Me•di•a (noun)

[méedee ə]

Television, newspapers, and radio collectively

the various means of mass communication considered as a whole, including television, radio, magazines, and newspapers, together with the people involved in their production

Okay. This probably would have made a better first post, but I’ve never been much beholden to chronology in blogs; I’m more of a stream-of-consciousness kind of poster. Right now, initiated by my assignment, I’m thinking about what media. I find the definition above to be somewhat dated, of course, ignoring the internet as it does, but it’ll do as a sort of “you get the idea” kind of definition. It was hard to get through this recent election without some chagrin, what with all the whining about the right’s favorite Big Bad, the “Mainstream Media” (hereafter noted by the conventional “MSM” shorthand). What was different this time around, as best I can tell, was the tremendous focal point the internet and blogs were. Even yesterday, Sarah Palin’s interview (ETA: seriously, someone’s still interviewing her? Weird… Aren’t her 15 minutes over yet?) in which she railed against the bloggers of the world started to get some play in the national news. According to her, the internet was chock-a-block with bloggers spreading filthy lies about her and her family, and the MSM, of course, hating her as they do, repeated these lies without benefit of fact-check or…

Okay, now really. Look, the internet belongs to everybody. Most of the eyes perusing even the venerable old institutions (the NYT, the Washington Post, etc.) are doing so online, and "the internet" is just not the scary, faceless, new-fangled thing it was fifteen years ago (and no, I'm not going to get into McCain's computer illiteracy, that's been commented on ad nauseum). More to the point, perhaps, this is a Wikipedia society; everybody gets to chip in. I’m not saying that “hard news” should be dictated by general consensus, but I think it’s evident that, aside from trying to follow a complete embarrassment of a president, the GOP’s biggest mistake wasn't their policies (or even their tone, although that was a doozy) but rather their complete failure to play the media game. While declaring enmity with the media used to play in Topeka as a sign of independence and boldness, “the media” is no longer a giant faceless force. When McCain/Palin & Co. starting bashing the media, they were bashing the very individual voices they were trying to court.

The media just isn’t what it used to be.

The MSM, by virtue of comparison to wiki-everything, has begun to seem a bastion of truth and serious investigation. “Bloggers” aren’t an anonymous fringe faction of people “not like you and me,” they are you and me. News is personal now – We’re as likely to get our information via text message, a friend’s bulletin on MySpace, or a favorite blog as we are from the front page of the NYT. If it was said once it was said a hundred times – The GOP ran a campaign that probably would have worked – indeed, had worked - in another year, but they failed to recognize the myriad changes that had taken place in the country since 2004. “Media” is no longer appropriately defined by the description above, and whether you want to make a valuable friend or vanquish an enemy, you can’t do it without knowing who/what you’re dealing with first.

“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.” - Harold Wilson

Cheers!