Actually, Mr. Cole nails his detractor, one Mr. Matthew Haughey author of the blog
A Whole Lotta Nothing to the wall over his objections to the usage of "MSM" (Main Stream Media)in his latest entry
here. For the unintiated who aren't familiar with Mr. Haughey you can see a quick bio
here. He is better known as the author of the
MetaFile blog. Mr. Cole's exception to Mr. Haughey's threat to stop reading those who:
use the term "MSM" in a unironic way to denote the "Mainstream Media" I will write you off as a quack, unsubscribe from your RSS, and stop reading your blog.
is put into perfect context by explaining to Mr. Haughey the difference between the MSM and the blogosphere:
The difference, Matt, is that we are independent actors, not part of a small set of multi-billion dollar corporations. The difference is that we are not under the constraints of making a 15% profit. The difference is that we are a distributed information system, whereas MSM is like a set of stand-alone mainframes. The difference is that we can say what we damn well please.
If we were the mainstream media, we would care if you threatened to stop reading us. Because although we might be professional news people, we would have the misfortune to be working for corporations that are mainly be about making money.
We would be ordered to try to avoid saying anything too controversial (and I don't mean "Crossfire" controversial), because we would be calculating what would bring in 15% profits per annum on our operating capital. Would hours and hours of television "reportage" and discussion of Michael Jackson or of Terri Schiavo or Scott Peterson (remember?) bring in viewers and advertising dollars? Then that is what we would be giving the public. Bread and circuses.
Then Mr. Cole gets to the heart of the matter:
Would giving airtime to Iraq, where we Americans have 138,000 troops and are spending $300 billion that we don't have, be too depressing to bring in the audience and advertising and the 15% profit? Then we would dump it in favor of bread and circuses. We'd dump Afghanistan as a story even faster, since there are "only" 17,000 US troops in that country, and it is only a place where Ben Laden may be hiding out and from which the US was struck on 9/11, leaving 3,000 dead and the Pentagon and World Trade Center smouldering.
Near the end of Mr. Cole's rant he gives Mr. Haughey the final dressing down and though it's a thorough pasting, somehow it still doesn't seem enough:
So, yes, Matt. There is a difference between these little dog and pony shows we post from our homes, with no editor, no CEO, no boss, and no resources beyond our personal experiences, talent and acumen. If Josh Marshall worked for mainstream media, would his editor let him say all the same things he says at Talkingpointsmemo.com? Would Tom Engelhardt be allowed to discuss the ways in which the Iraq quagmire suggests the limits of superpowerdom if he were working for the Big Six? If Bill Montgomery worked for The Weather Channel, would he be allowed to criticize Senator Rick Sanatarium for trying to keep Federal forecasters from "competing" with private weather forecasting companies? Would Riverbend be allowed to be so incisive if she worked for a big Iraqi computer firm? Remember the famous question, "Can blogging get you fired?"
And this difference, my friends, accounts for why bloggers get vilified. Journalists can be switched to another story, or fired, or their stories can be buried on page 36. We can't be fired. So if Mortimer Zuckerman doesn't like what we have to say, he will publish a hatchet job on us in The New Republic, seeking to make us taboo. If you can't shut people up, and you really don't want their voices heard, then all you can do is try to persuade others not to listen to them or give them a platform. The easiest way to do this is to falsely accuse them of racism or Communism some other character flaw unacceptable to polite society. Because of the distributed character of blogging "computing," however, such tactics are probably doomed to fail.
We are not the mainstream media, and we are here. Get used to it.
The fact that Time Magazine just sullied their cover with Ann Coulter and the subsequent omission of her glaring and blatant errors in her work tells us all we need to know about the MSM and where they stand. Mr. Cole was right in pointing that out to the seemingly clueless Mr. Haughey.
DuvalDem
"The problem is not that the White House press secretary cannot distinguish who is or is not a journalist; it is that there are no journalists, just the gaming of the system for the concentration of power."
~Sidney Blumenthal