Freedom of the press has always belonged only to those that own one in this country. The media business has always been able to count on the cost of setting up a press (or a transmitter) to hold down competition and on the limited geographic range of their product to insure a captive audience. These two factors gave them an advertising market and made pay-for-content a viable proposition,while making ownership/control politically attractive.

The Internet swept both of these cornerstones of the media business away. Almost everyone can own their own press and pump out electrons at almost no cost. The range of each person’s output is limited only by language and the quality/appeal of their work. Suddenly the local newspaper’s reporting has to compete with a twitterer in Iran and a housewife in Iowa. Horror of horrors, the twitterer turns out to be more timely and accurate and the housewife turns out to be wiser and a better writer, even if she didn’t have a journalism degree.

More importantly, the Internet offers no natural, alternative bases for the traditional limited competition/captive audience model. Even if the traditional media were able to do away with net neutrality, the network cannot readily be made to favor a few players the way it once did.

Hence the MSM whining for entitlements and handouts. It’s over and they can’t change. But it’s not because they can’t master the technology needed to do journalism anymore. It’s because they can’t make a lot of money at it. Journalism just became a fully commoditized product. Talk is now well and truly cheap, and the media types aren’t in it for the ideas.

One of the things we miss about the blogosphere is how much of the facts are drawn from the NYT, WaPo, Guardian and other print newspapers who have full-time reporters covering the facts of an issue and originating the coverage. The blogosphere just hasn’t developed a news service capability yet. We are continually have to deconstruct facts out of better or worse reporting in the print media. For some print reporters this is easy because they are fact-based. For others, there’s a lot of reading between the lines.

HuffPo has done an interesting experiment during the Iran election crisis. They sourced everything that they could find in reports, YouTubes, posting on blogs, postings on Twitter to create a narrative of what was going on in Iran. What they proved is how difficult it is to get the facts from a closed society using the internet alone as a communications medium.

If basic reporting is Obama’s concern, he is right that there is a shortage of good straightforward reporting. But most straight-forward reporting is buriedn in the back pages or dropped during editing because it doesn’t have “impact”.

That said, there is no justification for another gratuitous slap at the blogosphere. And there certainly is analysis and opinion pieces in the left blogosphere that are more professionally crafted than much in the print media.

Thanks for this, Tarheel. People choosing to turn this into yet another Three Minutes’ Hate need to be realistic about the costs of journalism. As Don Hewitt said, his biggest regret about the success of 60 Minutes was that it made people think that journalism had to be profitable — that it had to make money — when in fact it’s always been subsidized because it is so expensive.

HuffPo has done an interesting experiment during the Iran election crisis. They sourced everything that they could find in reports, YouTubes, posting on blogs, postings on Twitter to create a narrative of what was going on in Iran. What they proved is how difficult it is to get the facts from a closed society using the internet alone as a communications medium.

If basic reporting is Obama’s concern, he is right that there is a shortage of good straightforward reporting. But most straight-forward reporting is buriedn in the back pages or dropped during editing because it doesn’t have “impact”.

That said, there is no justification for another gratuitous slap at the blogosphere. And there certainly is analysis and opinion pieces in the left blogosphere that are more professionally crafted than much in the print media.

The Orwellian Bush years continue.

Funniest thing in Hugh’s link – In the ’60s LBJ laid a wood grain linoleum floor in the oval.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know I saw your kitty comment. Be sure to drop by Southern Dragon’s Caturdays.