Month: <span>May 2007</span>

BillMoyers-medium.jpg: I was just having a quick scan through my RSS feeds, and ran across this post on the blog for Bill Moyers Journal, under which is one of the best written comments I’ve seen, in support of bloging’s positive influence on the mainstream media. daldude writes:

“Based on what I’ve read in these comments and elsewhere, the primary concern regarding blogs seems to be that of accountability. It’s certainly a valid issue, but when we have reporters for the NYT fabricating stories for years without discovery, primetime mainstream pundits like O’Reilly and Hannity saying whatever they please without regard for facts, 24-hour cable rumor mills, video news releases, ‘anonymous government sources’, and of course, the whole fiasco of media complicity in the build up to the Iraq War, it seems like the traditional journalism pot calling the kettle blog a dark color…

“… I have to cast a suspicious eye on those who lament the decline of this bulwark of elitism [mainstream media]; who seem to feel that we poor common folk cannot be trusted to discern the facts on our own, and must be shepherded by credentialed professionals. To me, it is these very qualifications that that call the shepherds’ motives into question — ‘credentialed’ means they’ve been screened and approved by the status quo establishment, and ‘professional’ means they are financially dependent on (and thus subservient to) their corporate bosses. Any confidence in the system of self-imposed ‘quality control’ amongst these professionals seems wholly unfounded and dangerously naive at this point.”

I’m pretty sure that liberals and conservatives alike can agree with much of what daldude has to say above. What do you think?

Politics