…To the outraged whines coming from denizens of the Big MSM, as they find their fat, smug, complacent butts abruptly kicked out onto the street by advancing technology and a general disenchantment with the stories they are peddling as news.
“What,” they whine, “can replace us? We’re not just irreplaceable, we are the Fourth Estate - democracy is doomed without us.”
Hooey. For years, it has been a running joke in the blogosphere to mock the hapless MSM writer who claimed that newspapers, with their “four” (or was it five?) layers of editors were far superior to bloggers, who sat in their pajamas while posting to their blogs from their basements and living rooms. Gleefully, we have pointed out just how much ignorant, stupid, wrong junk passing as “unbiased, accurate journalism” evades those layers of eagle-eyed editors to appear on your dead tree journals and ancient cathode-ray tv tubes.
Which brings me to the future of news reporting, which is, as they say, happening now. That’s right, the future is now, and it’s happening at places like Instapundit, and dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of other blogs.
Did the MSM cover the Tea Party protests? No, it didn’t. If you read the bigs, you’d be entirely unaware that thousands of people were gathering to protest the Obama/Pelosi/Reid spending frenzy, and that the movement was growing every day.
But you knew about it if you read Instapundit. In fact, you knew a lot about it. Why? Because dozens of people right there on the scene of these protests, equipped with a technological miracle - the equivalent of a 1980s tv truck in a box called a cell phone with video - snapped pictures or videos of the protests as they happened, and then beamed them via email to Instapundit, who posted those pics and videos, along with commentary written by others either on the scene or on other blogs far away.
He’s still doing it. So is everybody else.
In a very few short years, that is how all of us will get out news. We’ll read the blogs that cover what interests us, and we’ll see things happening in, or almost in, real time, and we’ll read news, commentary, and analysis written by writers we trust, and we’ll even be writing some of that commentary, news, and analysis ourselves.
Somebody called it an An Army of Davids
And given the intellectual, ideological, and technological wasteland that the Big MSM has become, it can’t happen soon enough for me.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!
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The Mendacious Story Manglers are still in business? Who knew? Aside from the free village weekly I haven’t read a newspaper in ages* nor watched TV news** in even longer.
* OK, I’d sometimes read the funnies while heating my food if someone left a paper in the lunchroom.
** “News” used in the “propaganda, sports, and weather” sense.
Not Even once did I see any coverage on the ongoing Stirring Tea Moment, God forbid we should have equal coverage in the MSM, but then again if they don’t promote it it never happen, well thats the plan the left has for us, you cant tell me these media maniacs don’t realize they are on the top of the slide down and when they hit bottom, they are pile driving 1000 times faster than we did when the bottom drops out since were already at the bottom pulling up our boot straps to recovery. I say orange peako tea is my favorite and maybe if the MSM is lucky ill hand them the string unattached of course, since that’s more than they have been offering us as of late, but good news guess what! we don’t need them we have a voice its only a matter of time before everybody’s hungry for the TRUTH! even the left needs to eat!
Sue, I agree completely. Er, I think I do. Might I suggest either less beer, so you’re more coherent, or more beer, so you’re funny while being incoherent?
Not Even once did I see any coverage on the ongoing Stirring Tea Moment,…
Here’s a passing mention in SF’s resident leftist “newspaper”…
The Fourth Estate hasn’t looked at what has happened to their neighborhood lately. It’s become a pretty shabby place with lots of whining soapboxers on the street corners and peddlers of snake oil at their front doors. The land values there have fallen faster than the housing market’s. No bailout can help it as its built on swampland. Best to shut it down and write off the neighborhood…