Greg Ransom
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But why should this be? Powerline weighs in:
As the election campaign heats up, and mainstream media outlets run interference for John Kerry, the blogosphere has suddenly come of age and is starting to fulfill the predictions of the last year or two. Suddenly, the blogosphere is front and center, driving the news cycle, along with other "new media" outlets--talk radio and, to a lesser extent, cable news. The traditional media's monopoly has been broken, and they have lost their ability to control the news cycle and dictate the information that Americans receive--and don't receive ..Posted by Greg RansomWe're just getting started, but it isn't hard to see where all of this is heading. What powers the blogosphere is what powers talk radio -- the bloggers, sure, but far more important, a core of readers and listeners that is engaged, passionate, and above all, well-informed. It's the dialogue, the quick response, the almost instantaneous supplementation of information and the quick correction of errors, and the freewheeling search for information and truth that puts the blogosphere head and shoulders above conventional journalism.
You couldn't do this with, say, neurosurgery. A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field. But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can't? Nothing. Generally speaking, they don't know any more about primary data and raw sources of information than we do--often less. Their general knowledge is often inadequate. Their superior resources should allow them to carry out investigations far beyond what we amateurs can do. But the reality is that the mainstream media rarely use those resources. Too many journalists are bored, biased and lazy. And we bloggers are not dependent on our own resources or those of a few amateurs. We can get information from tens of thousands of individuals, many of whom have exactly the knowledge that journalists could (but usually don't) expend great effort to track down -- to take just one recent example, the passability of the Mekong River at the Vietnam/Cambodian border during the late 1960s ..
It's an exciting time to inhabit the blogosphere. Buckle your seat belts; it will be a wild ride from now to November ..
