Blogging is a bottom up movement, where framed debate is taken apart bit by bit until essence can be discovered. What folks are discovering when finding essence is that much of the media is slanted, planned and controlled to coordinate the macro views of the entrenched movement.
I gather you are talking about Fox News, about MSNBC (which is trying to copy Fox), about the Wall Street Journal, about the Washington Times, et al.
If you think that bloggers are the wave of a more populist politics, best watch out that you get what you wish for. It's a wild, wild world out there. Bloggers come in all sorts of political stripes--right and left, mainstream and not, ideologues and not. You name it. That's one of the reasons I don't seem them becoming a political force on the basis of their views.
I also expect some sort of audience filtering process to take place. You can see the rudimentary forms of that now. Folk like Dave Winer, Joshua Marshall, and Andrew Sullivan get more attention now. Thanks to filtering. Then there is the role of money. As Kurtz says in his column, wait until the Bush folk, with all that corporate money, decide that weblogs have something serious to do with getting elected. You will find a veritable swamp of George Bush weblogs out there. All paid for by your friendly multinational, global, etc. drug company. (A metaphor please) |
