We NEED the Mainstream Media?

On TownHall.com's Weekend Journal, this past weekend, in his book, The Cult of the Amateur (How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture), Andrew Keen says that blogs have managed to undermine the Mainstream Media but only to the denigration of the MSM, individuals, the internet and privacy itself (transcribed generally by me over the, oddly enough, internet):

Keen: "I say about Web 2.0: For a really intelligent honest media," Keen insists, "you need professionals and movie-makers who can provide us with a high quality and reliable media. If you radically Democratize the media, which is what the Web 2.0 people want, you do away, in the language of Silicon Valley, with professional journalists and agents and editors and writers and gatekeepers and what I consider to be the very valuable traditional ecosystems of media. And ultimately you get chaos and you get an Oligarchy. So in my view it's no coincidence that Aristotle and Plato placed Oligarchy close to Democracy; a balanced, managed Democracy -- those are the Democracies that work. Flattened Democracies, pure Democracies don't work.

And what you see in the Web 2.0 world is a very, very dangerous development. You see the undermining of our traditional media with its reliance on truth, accuracy -- and the Blogosphere -- this chaotic, anarchic, unreliable thing which undermines all the basic virtures of our traditional media.

Moderator: what about Crowd Sourcing; there's no central authority, it's what everybody wants and this is what we do; try to narrow this down to the root of the problem. Your problem is not with blogs per se or the internet as a vehicle for a source of information. It's with the idea that it lacks authority, verification. Anyone can post anything and because it's on the internet "it must be true." As an illustration you use Wikipedia, YouTube, Craig's List. Is the problem that anybody becomes an authority?

Keen: You nailed it, and this is a broad phenomenon, one of the battles in this war on the Blogosphere. One of my biggest critics is a fellow called David Weinberger, at Harvard, who has written a book called Everything Is Miscellaneous. He argues that knowledge is miscellaneous, that everything is relativized, there's no way of proving anything. My biggest critics are Post Modernists. And if we do away with authority and truth, then who knows what to believe?

And that's the Blogosphere. If we do away with authority and truth, then every opinion, every absurd argument becomes as legitimate as anything else.

Moderator: but hasn't the Mainstream Media done the best job of undermining itself? If you look at the New York Times, the scandals involving plagiarism, you look at the Dan Rather/CBS series of the stories they ran against all evidence -- to name but the merest few -- should in fact the Mainstream Media be the standard in which we judge the Blogosphere? Is the Mainstream Media telling us the truth or not?

Keen: the MSM may not be ideal, it has its warts, it has its weaknesses, its scandals, but if we undermine it it's a catastrophe. I'm all for giving the Internet a kick in the pants; what I'm against is the Internet giving it a kick elsewhere. Because if we lose the authority, and I use that word very carefully, if we lose the professional authority of the Mainstream Media, then we embrace this relativized Blogosphere. Research and professional standards go out the window.

No one knows what to believe or who to believe.

I love the internet; I use it all the time. I'm certainly not a Luddite; I don't want to close it down. What I am saying is that it needs more professional standards. Ironically enough, with the Internet we're really re-creating the wheel in the sense that we need to create an ecosystem where you have gatekeepers, where you have people we trust, able to tell us what's good and what isn't.

BZ Weighs In:

And who, might you postulate, is RESPONSIBLE for these apparently heinous states of affairs? Who has managed to hold sway over public opinion for over 50+ years? Who has only, since the mid-80s, found their voice in media venues such as talk radio, smaller publications and, most recently, the Blogosphere and FNC?

If you would ask the Left, it is the Right. If you ask the Right, it is the Left.

In truth it is the Left who existed all along because they were in power.

This interview merely confirms the breadth and depth that the MSM and the Left will go in order to express not only their "displeasure" but shock and anger that Conservatism is, only now, beginning to challenge (and EFFECTIVELY SO!) and make an inroad and a brusque intrusion into the stranglehold that the Democrat Left has historically enjoyed for decades over all forms of media in the United States.

The Democrats and the Left, pushed to the wall, (we must now realize) will and shall take any stance and employ any ruse and ploy in order to keep historic power.

Never, ever in the history of the United States, have the Left been challenged and had their thoughts and theories refuted, questioned and thrown back into their faces as now.

They are staggered, they are aghast but, believe me, they are this moment plotting Conservatism's downfall.

Do not doubt this for a microsecond.

The only umbrage taken is that Conservatives have become so effective and so acknowledged in such a short time.

BZ