Kos calls us out a little while ago for using the right-wing "MSM" frame:
...by calling them "mainstream media", we are saying that we ourselves aren't mainstream, and that's not something I'm willing to concede. This site gets far more readers than most "mainstream media" publications, so why are they mainstream, while we are, by definition, the fringe?
... We, on the other hand, are firmly on the mainstream on just about every major issue facing our country, and our numbers are growing. We aren't outside the mainstream, we are representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we're selling.
True enough. But what are they, then?
"Corporate media" can work. But my preferred term is "traditional media" -- a nice, neutral, non-negative way to differentiate old media versus the newfangled stuff.
The point is a good one, as far as it goes. But focusing on the stream (main or otherwise) misses the broad point of what distinguishes one set of media from another. Also, it misses why Daily Kos and blogs like it are the front line of not merely a new medium, but an evolutionary leap in whole enterprise of mass communication. I do not exaggerate.
Let's contemplate this via the basic Communication 101 rendition of communication: the Shannon-Weaver Model (not a pretty mandala, but it will do):
a Source -- encodes and transmits a
Message -- via a
Channel (where there may be interference) -- to a
Receiver -- who decodes it.
Throughout the history of news media, this model roughly approximated reality. Significant changes were marked in terms of who and how many were the receivers (clan, tribe, kingdom, nation) and/or (culminating with McLuhan) the implications of the channels (media) themselves for the decoding process.
Nevertheless, one correspondence between the Shannon-Weaver Model and "the media" has existed from the days of drumming on a log to the dawn of cable television. The arrows -- at least the ones that mattered -- tended to be unidirectional. This implies a far greater importance (i.e. rank) for the source than for the receiver. Even if receivers did get to offer feedback, the source continued to exercise editorial control.
The internet changed all that. The arrows would be omnidirectional, if we bothered to draw them. Communication is not a linear process here on this blog; it is instead a complex, adaptive system of ideas, feelings, questions, and answers, swarming in a (usually) self-correcting fashion.
The difference, to use a family analogy, is like the difference between a stern paterfamilias pontificating and suffering those who would speak to do so with a gesture of his finger, and a big picnic with all the aunts and uncles and cousins, plenty of sodas and Sam Adams, and everyone talking over each other but nobody caring about that much because everybody gets their say and everybody gets heard sooner or later.
The paterfamilias types don't like these picnics much.
(To those who might counter that donuts and banning on Daily Kos imply as much editorial control as your daily newspaper, I suggest you might be confusing chaos with complexity. Unlike your daily dead-tree read, here we find ground rules that are easily accessed and understood -- signing onto the blog implies an agreement to them -- and then we're good to go.)
So "traditional media" is OK by me as a way to describe those whom we are not, insofar as we're identifying rank as fundamental to traditional mass mediated communication.
Maybe the "linear media" would be more precise, although that does sound geeky. "First generation" works for me. It implies that gadgets such as movable type, radios, televisions, and satellite dishes are secondary in meaning to the primary commonality of rank.
And the fun thing is, first generation people just can't get what the second generation is about.