Telling It Like It Is

Michael Duff gets down to the heart of the Blogsphere vs. Major Media grudgematch in The Roots of the Problem. Some choice excerpts, but the whole essay is prime.

[I]f there is any justice in the world, it will lead to the collapse of the CBS news division, and the contrite resignation of Dan Rather. But there is no justice in the world, so events will unfold pretty much as the Belmont guys have predicted.

Dapper Dan will retire with dignity in a few years, and this story will be the province of "right-wing nutjobs" who wonder why they don't have press credentials yet.

I am skeptical about the influence of the blogosphere on mainstream media, not because I doubt the skills or the integrity of my colleagues (far from it!), but because I think we're in a cultural battle that we can't win.

I'm saying that even if we're right, we lose, because we're up against a guild system that has existed since the 30s....

At the same time FDR was drugging the country with diluted injections of Marxism, the culture of media was changing. What was once the province of fast-talking working-class dogs became a profession for degreed professionals.

Somewhere in the past seventy years, journalism went from being a vocation and turned into a profession. Today, that transformation is complete. Journalists are the newest members of the elite, achieving parity with doctors, lawyers, celebrities, and politicians. (Once you land a job with the right paper.)....

You think people go to j-school because they want to spend fifty years writing dry, objective news reports? Hell, no! That's intern work! They want to get in the ring and earn themselves a column. They want to shape the national debate.

They believe in the power of words. They believe in the power of thought. And just like the Democratic Party, they believe that words are enough to change reality. The right words in the right ears at the right time can inflate stock markets and bring down governments, because over time, we steered away from a system based on work and metal, and turned it into a system based on authority and words....

Journalists learned that they could change the world by influencing the actions of people in government. Today they exercise that power by controlling the reputations of people they write about.

I'm saying that journalists favor the centralization of power because it dramatically increases their influence. Once we get health care, retirement benefits, and education firmly in the hands of the government, journalists will be able to exercise tremendous influence over those systems, simply by writing for and against the people in charge....