300 MILLION LUTHERS:

Here I Blog, I Can Do No Other (Doug Kern, 10/05/2004, Tech Central Station)

Buoyed by the ascendancy of a new information technology, a revolution against the mainstream media (MSM) is underway. What began as a modest effort to reform the excesses of the MSM evolves into a total rejection of the MSM's right to mediate and interpret the truth. Bewildered by its huge loss of prestige, and embarrassed by its increasingly obvious shortcomings, the MSM alternately dismisses the revolution and lashes out against it. Slowly but inevitably, a new understanding emerges. Lay people realize that they have both the ability and the duty to find the truth on their own, free from the biases of a corrupt and self-serving institution. As the unrivalled authority of the MSM has collapsed, the MSM must curb its excesses and return to its primitive purity -- or collapse under the weight of its arrogance.

We're talking about 2004, the Internet, the blogosphere, and the big news reporting agencies, right?

Wrong. We're talking about the sixteenth century, the printing press, the first Protestants, and the Roman Catholic Church. [...]

If the MSM displayed its opinions and biases as completely as the blogs, it wouldn't affect so superior a tone. Had we seen Mary Mapes wearing a paper hat made of Kerry press releases and clapping her hands over the Rather memos while giggling "Bush lied, people died, memos gonna fly, Bush gonna FRY!" then the snide remarks about pajamas might subside. On the 'net, the scope of a blogger's wingnuttery is just a Google search away. Can the MSM say the same?

In the future there will be no "paper of record," no "America's most trusted news source," no conveniently anonymous editorial boards to shape the political discourse. The MSM excels at the gathering of information, but information is not synonymous with news. Information is data. News is a story. And it doesn't take a clerical collar or a journalism degree to tell a compelling story. On the net, every man is his own editor -- just as, in Protestantism, every man is his own priest.

Protestantism didn't destroy Catholicism, and the blogosphere will not destroy the MSM. A need will always exist for news and analysis written from a centrist position that aspires to be fair to the major political parties and positions.

Why aren't centrists partisans of the Center?

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 5, 2004 8:52 PM