The tabloid press is now using "Body Language Experts" to cover their lies about Hillary.

Ah, yes. The tabloid press now uses "Body Language 'Experts'." Both CNN and CBS did it. Why?

Simple. Even if there really is an effective "Body Language 'Expert'", how would anyone know who it was? And who is to stop any incompetent from claiming expertise? The so called "Body Language 'Experts'" don't add real data to the discussion. They are paid liars saying what the pundit wants said in a way that keeps the pundit's hands off the lie. It isn't about finding out what Hillary had to say. It's about getting the anti-Hillary narrative out there and claiming it came from an object source and not the pundit.

How long until the political press is hiring astrologers, mind readers and tarot card readers? Wait for it. It won't be long. The political news media has ceased to be a professionalized news media at all - if it ever was. It probably disappeared about the time degrees in journalism were replaced by degrees in communication.

When the Reagan administration removed the requirement that news be presented on the publicly-owned airwaves as a public service, "news" became just another profit center. More eyeballs are needed in order to charge more for advertising.

The result? News ceased to exist in the media. Now all that matters is polling the audience to see what they want as entertainment. Real news has a tendency to disrupt their safe, secure little cocoons. Real news interferes with the revenue stream.

Foreign bureaus became an overly expensive luxury. Then with the competition for eyeballs from the cable networks, entertaining shows have devolved into game shows and "cheap" so-called 'reality' shows.

But the use of "Body Language 'Experts'", mediums to speak to ghosts, astrologers, tarot card readers and so on differentiate the 'news' shows and the other entertainment shows from their competition.

The public media as a source of information and education is dead. It has been for well over a decade. And it's not coming back. Professionalized news media are dead and gone.

The conservatives recognized this and have created their own politicized media empires. They don't deliver news, they deliver votes. It's only the Democrats/Progressives/Liberals who still believe in the fantasy of a professionalized news industry.

[H/T to Steve Benen replacing Kevin Drum at Political Animal.]

Add Howard Kurtz to WaPo writers who won't report fairly on Democrats

Howard Kurtz is the Washington Post's writer covering the political media, and the WaPo does more of that coverage than any other news organization in America. That makes Howard Kurtz the most high profile media critic in the U.S.

On November 21st Joe Klein wrote a hit piece article in Time Magazine based on 'erroneous facts' - a polite term for lies Klein obtained from arch-conservative Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra who was not named in Klein's article. Based on Hoekstra's lies, Klein labeled Democrats as "Soft on Terror." Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald promptly did some fact checking that showed what Klein wrote was, in fact, completely wrong. Klein essentially refused to correct his error and Time Magazine supported him. Media Matters has the story. Time's late and timid admission of error was so weak that Democratic members of Congress complained about the article and demanded equal time to rebut the malicious lies Klein had published. It was the most significant issue in the political media for months. Which brings us to Howard Kurtz and the Washington Post.

The issue was one in which a well-known reporter at the largest political publication in the U.S. reported lies handed him by an extremist Republican Congress who is a known enemy of the Democrats and used those Republican lies to slime the Democratic leadership in Congress. Klein and Time then dragged their feet and finally printed a half-hearted correction that corrected nothing in spite of overwhelming evidence that he was wrong. Howie didn't bother to even acknowledge the issue for weeks, even going so far as to trash can requests by numerous bloggers to report on this issue during his weekly online chat with readers at washingtonpost.com. He knew the issue was there, but he conspicuously ignored it for weeks, then when he finally commented it was so inconspicuous and lacking in substance that Glenn Greenwald reports having missed it even though he was looking for it.

But that's Howie for you. In spite of his claim that he is even-handed in his reporting, Howie only defends conservative Republicans. As Eric Boehlert at Media Matters for America reports, this is a pattern for Howard Kurtz.

But it wasn't just the tardiness that raised eyebrows. Kurtz's late coverage did not include a single link to any of Greenwald's detailed dissections of Klein's blatant miscue and Time's dishonest handling of the error. Second, Kurtz contacted Klein but never pressed him on a single fact. Instead, Kurtz simply relayed Klein's quote: "I made a mistake, I corrected it and it's over." (Trust me, Klein did not "correct" his mistake.) Third, even though Kurtz contacted Klein for a quote, he did not contact Greenwald. And fourth, Kurtz claimed it was "the liberal blogosphere" that was still upset about the Klein gaffe, when it fact it was members of Congress who, at that point, were making the most noise about Klein's column.

So Kurtz badly missed a big media story, what's the big deal, right? Truth is the episode mirrors a long pattern, which is why more and more prominent players on the left no longer consider Kurtz to be an honest broker -- because he remains chronically oblivious to breaking stories that have a strong progressive media angle. Yet simultaneously, Kurtz shows a chronic over-eagerness to amplify any minor media story being advanced by conservatives. Earlier this year I wrote that The Washington Post had a "crush" on right-wing bloggers; that love -- though perhaps unrequited -- remains strong today.

"There's much concern about his ideological biases intruding into his work," Markos Moulitsas, the founder of DailyKos, told me in an email. Noting Kurtz's tardiness to the Klein column, Moulitsas said "any 'media critic' ignoring that story -- and it was a long-percolating one over the span of several weeks, giving multiple avenues of entry for critics -- is certainly a 'media critic' not doing his or her job."

Kurtz denies the charge: "I'm a down-the-middle reporter who doesn't consider ideology in covering this beat. Unlike some of my critics, I don't have an agenda."

But consider just two recent media controversies (both initiated by Media Matters) that the usually prolific Kurtz also ignored at the Post.

The first was Fox News talker Bill O'Reilly telling his radio listeners that when visiting a famous soul food restaurant in Harlem that he "couldn't get over the fact" that the black-owned establishment was just like restaurants owned by whites. He also noted approvingly that "black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves."

The second was right-winger Rush Limbaugh characterizing members of the U.S. military who oppose the war in Iraq as "phony soldiers." When the controversy broke, Limbaugh then edited transcripts of his program before posting them online to try to obfuscate the context.

Combined, those two stories garnered nearly 900 mainstream media mentions, according to Nexis. Yet not once did Kurtz, the most high-profile media writer in the country, write about them in The Washington Post. Not once. Kurtz could have also covered the stories through his daily online column, where he links to prominent news and media news stories. But again, according to a search of Nexis, Kurtz never linked to a single story about the O'Reilly or Limbaugh controversies as they raged in real time.

I don't doubt that Howard Kurtz and his bosses at the Washington Post consider themselves professional journalist who are doing objective, or at least even-handed, reporting on the American political scene. But they're fooling themselves, and no one else. They have a pro-Republican and pro-conservative bias a mile wide. And they seem to ignore the liberal bloggers completely. Why? Do they see the real competition to dead tree journalism there?

See also:

• The Washington Post doesn't like or respect Democrats
• Journalistic professionalism and complaints from the blogosphere
• Hillary is treating the media as hostile - good move, they ARE hostile..
  
• The 'media' has it in for Edwards, as they did for Gore. Why?

The 'media' has it in for Edwards, as they did for Gore. Why?

Media Matters pulls the various reports of media bias against Democratic Presidential candidates together for a rather damning story. What they don't report, however, is what motivates and permits such clear anti-Democratic bias by the media.

America's political reporters don't like John Edwards, and have tried to destroy him.

But don't take my word for it.

Marc Ambinder was one of the founders of ABC's The Note and is a contributing editor to the National Journal's Hotline newsletter. The Note and the Hotline consist largely of links to and excerpts of political news and commentary by other reporters with ample doses of snark and Rove-worship thrown in. Whatever they may lack in insight and judgment, The Note and the Hotline are at the center of the D.C. political media establishment.

Ambinder, in other words, is a political reporter whose job has largely been to understand the political media.

This week, Marc Ambinder explained why the media has covered John Edwards' grooming regimen so much and Mitt Romney's so little:

There is a difference in the political reality: fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn't like John Edwards.

Fairly or unfairly, there's also a difference in narrative timing: when the first quarter ended, the press was trying to bury Edwards. It's not so much interested in burying Romney right now -- many reporters think he's the Republican frontrunner.

Now, if reporters dislike a candidate, that's their business. But when they wage a relentless and petty campaign to "bury" that candidate, that's our business. All of us.

And we've been through this before.

The 2000 election was close enough that any number of things can fairly be described as having made the difference. But what Bob Somerby describes as the media's "War Against Gore" was undoubtedly one of the biggest factors in Bush's "victory." The contempt many political reporters felt for Gore is clear, as is the inaccurate, unfair, and grossly distorted coverage of Gore that decided the campaign. And, again, you needn't take my word for it: Bob Somerby, Eric Alterman, Eric Boehlert, and others have chronicled the acknowledgements by working journalists of their colleagues' hate for Gore. Jake Tapper described reporters "hissing" -- actually hissing -- Gore. Time's Eric Pooley described an incident in which a roomful of reporters "erupted in a collective jeer" of Gore "like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd."

And Joe Scarborough -- conservative television host Joe Scarborough; former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough -- has said that during the 2000 election, the media "were fairly brutal to Al Gore. ... [I]f they had done that to a Republican candidate, I'd be going on your show saying, you know, that they were being biased."

For this to be a conspiracy in the media there would have to be some group initiating the slurs of a particular Democratic candidate, and editors placing known biased reporters into reporting jobs covering those candidates. This wouldn't be a bit difficult when you consider how many of the top managers of the TV networks and publishers of newspapers are, in fact, extremely conservative.

Then if any major media reporter were to report on this tendency, either his stories would be spiked or the reporter would be left unsupported by the rest of the media. Since it does not make the media look good, this is exactly the reaction to be expected.

Conservatives have also "Worked the Refs" for years, complaining en mass about stories they considered biased against conservatism. Democrats have not been so tightly organized towards getting out the "Democratic message." In fact, the Democrats celebrate the disagreements, so organized efforts and astro-turf people's movements to complain about the media have not been developed on the side of the Democrats. This has allowed the media to drift too far right, a tendency strongly encouraged by right-wing extremist media owners like Richard Mellon Scaife and Rupert Murdoch.

The pressures on the media to report positively on right-wingers and attack Democrats make attacks on Democratic candidates like Gore and Edwards quite possible. The same pressures prevent adequate responses to those biased attacks on democrats by the few media critics who are published and widely read. Similar biased attacks on Republican candidates will never occur. Reporters and pundits who attempt such attacks would quickly find that they can be replaced by others equally talented and more compliant.

The level of direct control of the media that would allow this to be called a conspiracy isn't there. What is there is a social and political group which has both the money and the motivation to strongly influence the way the declining public media reports on politics and political candidates. There is sufficient control of FOX News and their TV channel as well as the captive right-wing Regnary Publishing to influence a lot of the media towards their issue while frightening them off of reporting against their issues. Since the public is mostly indifferent to the political ideology wars, this influence which has been mostly concealed from public sight and constant over a period of decades is what has created the current American society in which the idea of education and healthcare as a Right for every person cannot get the political support it needs to become reality.

---

See also the discussion of the conservative Republican Party in the consequences of Iraq which I published yesterday.

More media crap to scare the American public

Shock! Horror! Fear! There was a bombing attempt near a London West End night club!

Don't believe it? OH! Oh! CNN has the story, and it's not one car bomb. It's TWO! The first one was filled with nails and had two (not one, but two!) canisters of ... gasoline?

Wait a minute! Isn't that a suburban homeowner on the weekend with a carpentry project and the fuel for the lawn mower?

OK. So one Mercedes with nail and gasoline. But there was also a second nearby with propane canisters and nails inside. Coincidence? Well, CNN doesn't want its faithful viewers to think so.

For those of you not yet suspicions that we are hearing another media over-hyped provocation to fear, go check out Larry Johnson at his blog No Quarter.

For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incendiary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapenal.

And you wonder why I treat the so-called news media as delivering a load of really smelly crap? Especially FOX, CNN, and MSNBC.

There is NO TV NEWS that can be trusted. The do not deliver news to their viewers. Lies and over-hyped packaged efforts to manipulate the audiences' emotions? Yeah, that they deliver. But if you want news, turn off the TV.

Here is what even the so-called journalists on MSNBC think about the so-called news on their channels:
But the public will get what they ask for, right?

D.C. Pundit Corps motto: "Keep them in the dark and feed them B.S."

Glenn Greenwald states it very nicely:

One could write media criticisms for the next several years and not come close to capturing the essence of our Beltway media the way [Richard] Cohen [Washington Post] did in this single paragraph:

With the sentencing of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald has apparently finished his work, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, to make a mountain out of a molehill. At the urging of the liberal press (especially the New York Times), he was appointed to look into a run-of-the-mill leak and wound up prosecuting not the leaker -- Richard Armitage of the State Department -- but Libby, convicted in the end of lying. This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.

That really is the central belief of our Beltway press, captured so brilliantly by Cohen in this perfect nutshell. When it comes to the behavior of our highest and most powerful government officials, our Beltway media preaches, "it is often best to keep the lights off." If that isn't the perfect motto for our bold, intrepid, hard-nosed political press, then nothing is.

That is the motto that should be inscribed at the top of Fred Hiatt's Editorial Page in pretty calligraphy. And let us acknowledge what a truly superb job they have been doing in keeping the lights off.

A better example of what the old statement "Keep them in the Dark and Feed them Bullshit" means could not be written.

The "them" in that statement is, of course, the American public. You. Me. Ambiance is "Dark." Menu is "Bullshit." In the past this was the only restaurant in town, and we were expected to pay for what we could get and leave quietly. The pundits even got to where they expected a Tip for their service.

What has happened is that the politicians - the denizens of Washington, D.C. on who the pundits started their careers as reporters describing and reporting on, are also the people who the reporters and pundits talk to. Those "denizens" operate in the murky realms of politics where much of what is done really is, to say the least, highly unsavory. Those "denizens" operate based on the idea that their murky doings are best not revealed.

The reporters and pundits are, in theory, in the business of revealing and reporting those murky dealings to us - to the American public. But here is the problem. While they are supposedly being paid to report to us, they don't listen to us! Never have, and that is the way they like it. They listen instead to the politicians on whom they are supposed to report, and those politicians really, really don't like being investigated and reported on. They want someone supposedly reporting on them to actually be speaking for them.

That's what Richard Cohen is doing. He is speaking for the politicians, not reporting on the politicians. Want examples? Go read Eric Boehlert at (the blog, natch) Huffington Post (via .)

Gee. It should not come as a surprise that the politician spokespersons who call themselves reporters and who have spent their full career speaking for politicians feel put upon when some of their mere audience stand up on their hind legs and tell them You are failing to do your jobs as reporters!

That is the basis of the "reporter/pundit" put-downs of bloggers. Many Bloggers are telling the most experienced old hands in the D.C. pundit corps that they have spent their professional lives as so-called reporters living a lie.

Uh, oh. Some of the bullshit is being exposed to the light, and the professional bullshit artists (pundits - Cohen, Hiatt, Klein, etc.) are reacting like spiders who have lived their lives in the dark do when a spot light is shined on them. We are watching them react with high anxiety as the D.C. pundit/reporters scramble to find their comfortable, dark niches so that they can again be comfortable.

There are still things that the "Spiderhole Restaurant" have on the menu that can't be found in any of the newer, alternative restaurants. But I'm damned sure not going to Tip for what I now find is and has been really rotten service. I don't care how anxious it makes the pundits. Their anxiety and refusal to face the new environment is not MY problem. They will just have to adapt.

I have always enjoyed shining lights on spiders in the dark and watching them scramble. As a blogger, I have a new flashlight. The D.C. pundit spiders will just have to learn that they are now a part of my entertainment.

Bwahahahaha. Run, spiders, run! And thanks, Glenn.

Are we really watching the beginning of a political sea change?

When I read this from Glenn Greenwald, I was rather sucked in and feeling good. It's a very good article, and I feel like there is a lot of truth in it. I also watched the Friday Night Bill Moyer Report on PBS with Jon Stewart followed by Josh Marshall. Stewart is a very bright man with singular insight into current politics. Josh Marshall is another bright, capable person, but he goes back to an older form of journalism. You know, fact-based and carefully sourced. He makes sure he follows leads and finds out where his stories come from, and then follows up. I don’t see much of that these days.

News narratives.

I wasn’t the only person in the blogosphere to believe there was something special in that PBS show. Here is Booman at Booman Tribune. Then someone named "Gator" presented this diary at dKos. The common thread seems to be that with the blogosphere, shows like that of Bill Moyers and Jon Stewart, and Josh Marshall's return to solid journalism we seem to be seeing a new source of “news narrative” in American politics.

The older narratives came from the two political parties mediated by the journalists. Each party presented the narrative as they see it and the journalists are there report those narratives and to give readers a feeling for how closely the reported narratives matched with reality. This is not working as well as we used to think it did.

News organizations, financing and centralization.

Political journalism is a side effect of a healthy, competitive group of well-financed mass news organizations. Those mass news organizations are financed primarily by advertising revenue. News must be collected and then distributed. As more methods of distributing news are developed (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and now the internet) each method of distribution competes with more organizations for the same advertising dollars. As revenue for each organization drops, costs must be cut. But distribution costs are fixed by the technology used, and can’t be reduced significantly for mature distribution technologies. That means that organizations tend to centralize news collection and distribute the news through more outlets. Two reporters at a central location feeding news to half a dozen newspapers can often replace a single reporter at each newspaper. This has reduced the number of outlets that offer different points of view for national and international news.

The technology of both Radio and broadcast TV allows an organization that centralizes production of content over a number of outlets to under price individual outlets that produce their own content. The more outlets any one corporation has, the lower the cost of content for each of them. Since the cost of distribution is already established, the networks have a big cost advantage.

News versus entertainment.

News is not a major factor in this, since entertainment is what draws the big bucks advertising. But for TV, with four broadcast networks and any number of cable networks drawing off low-cost high-audience productions like sports, content production funds are best spent on providing entertainment. For news itself, to become a revenue producer requires that it be both entertaining and cheap. That’s what gives the public news of O. J. Simpson, Lacey Peterson, Brittany Spears and Anna Nicole Smith. Those are cheap. Investigatory stories and foreign news bureaus are expensive luxuries most TV news providers and no radio news can afford.

Newspapers face the same competition for advertising dollars, and ALL they can offer is news and advertisements. Since TV news sets the news agenda, foreign news bureaus are unnecessary for regional newspapers and too expensive to maintain even for cachet. Real news is a loss leader to attract readers to advertisements. Expensive news can be less and less afforded. So the major newspapers also centralize into a few groups that exchange news. The larger groups have a Washington bureau, the rest depend on news services like the Associated Press. National political news produced by experts in politics has become a specialty of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun Times, and the Los Angeles Times, with only the first two really having a large effort. Foreign bureaus are primarily for the New York Times and the Washington Post. The LA Times still has some Latin American bureaus (I think) but they are under pressure to close them.

National politics is not a big draw to newspaper audiences. TV presents the headlines, and very few people who read advertisements also look for extensive explanations behind the headlines. Except for extremely unusual news items like the tsunami in the Indian Ocean or the (misnamed) Iraq War there is no demand for foreign news at all. (Consumer Demand is not the same as the NEED for that news. A lot more is needed.) TV does not do in-depth investigations, nor do most newspapers. Investigatory journalism of any kind is being priced out of the market. Name the last big story CNN or FOX has broken based on an in-depth investigation. I don't know of one. Such stories cost too much and don't increase advertising rates.

The political reporting process.

The result of the above competitive pressures is that national political journalism has been reduced to a few overworked reporters each getting a statement from a candidate or incumbent from one party, sometimes (clearly not always) asking for the response from the other party, typing it up and publishing it. Getting additional statements from independent experts has become quite rare. The reporter probably knows when one side is lying and the other is not, but to say so is "unbalanced" and unbalanced is "Unfair." If nothing else, it will cause a conflict the editors don’t want to deal with. So the readers or viewers are given two sides in what may be a multi-sided story (or may be a one sided story contradicted by lies from opponents like the Swift-boaters) with no information that allows the news consumer to determine which side is closer to accurate.

The result is that the major journalism outlets have become little more than channels for the two political parties to use to present their spin. There is no one in journalism with the time, expertise, or independent stature to present a judgment on what each side says.

Most of this is because of the inherent economics journalism, primarily broadcast TV journalism, together with the ability of the executives who control the TV and radio networks to get government to let a few of them centralize and shut out the competition from independent stations and smaller potential network groups. The Republican Party, with its "Free Market" ideology and objection to government regulation is the natural place for the executives of the TV and radio networks to go to get what they want.

Control of centralized news organizations.

There is a good argument that the pressures forcing centralization of control of the news allows too few people to determine what everyone can read or see. If the current economic market remains, then the results will be a small number of generalist reporters acting as stenographers for the two major parties. Their results will dominate all the news outlets. This will give the cheapest, lowest quality news to the widest possible audiences.

The Democrats have generally bought into the misplaced free market rhetoric and let them get away with it. The last time they did this was with banks in the 1920's. Banks create the majority of the money supply. The Great Depression was a result, in part, of unregulated and unprotected banks going bust, taking many of their customers with them, and causing a sharp contraction in the money supply, which led to even more banks and businesses going bust. (Or so Milton Friedman rather convincingly wrote.)

For the banks this has required the government to change market conditions so that banks do not independently manipulate the overall money supply. This has become the job of the Federal Reserve and is accomplished by control of the fractional banking system. To shrink the money supply the Fed will increase the amount of bank assets required to support each dollar of loans they make. But the key is that the government modified the market so that banks competed in areas where their expertise provide the best results for the overall economy.

A change in the market for news could be mandated to create a market for competing organizations that provide National news, political news and foreign news. One way to do this would be to limit the amount of allowable news organization centralization, and require each local news outlet to buy its national, political and foreign news from specialized news producers. Long-term contracts for this kind of news would be prohibited. This would create a new market for these types of news. The Associated Press and UPI used to fill this market. The Washington Post and New York Times news services would have to be set up as independent news services to compete with AP and a newly independent UPI.

Then reestablish the Fairness Doctrine together with the idea that radio and TV stations used the public airwaves and needed to return public benefits for the right to do so have been effectively eliminated.

The blogosphere provides a new look at all this, but it will not eliminate the need for decentralization of news organizations.

The blogosphere is a new factor.

The blogosphere is an additional way for those of us who feel left out by the executives running the Democratic and Republican Parties and the excessively centralized news organizations to get the additional information they don't want us to have. The blogosphere is not going to replace the mass media. But it will sharply effect how many of us react to it. It is becoming a major source of “truth-squadding” the news. It is far from perfect, but it is still in an infant stage.

The mass media depends on customers who want other things, like being entertained, to tune in and as a side effect, get some news. The mass media assumes that we are all alike, and that as customers our news needs can be predetermined and packaged for a few large groups. Those groups are then sold to advertisers who want to sell something to them.

The political effects of this kind of news distribution.

Since the media operates that way, the two American political parties operate that way. That is a requirement of using the top-down media system. Polls are a method of getting some idea of what the market wants, but even the polls are designed as top-down systems. They present the questions and the customers respond. Anything else is too expensive to be efficient.

Centralized political organization.

The Republican Party is also a very centralized organization. This is in part because of the psychological needs for certainty of many of the people who currently vote Republican, and in part because such an organization works better with centralized media organizations, large centralized businesses, and centralized religious organizations.

Centralized and tightly controlled organizations have a real advantage when getting large numbers of people to quickly work for the same goal is important. Centralized and tightly controlled organizations are also quicker to react to existential threats to their being. That's why a major rule of war is unity of command. Such organizations are frankly more efficient, especially when a fast response is required.

Decentralized political organization.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of many groups with different goals and needs. As such it does not have a strong central hierarchy to control it.

(I'm going to speculate here.) Once upon a time the Democratic Party had its own internal sources of information, but when America became a nation that was essentially run by the Democratic Party those sources were no longer needed. The national news media was enough. As long as the news organizations reported what was really happening, an internal news organization for Democrats was redundant. So it disappeared.

The Republicans did not have the luxury of depending on the public news media. Its assumptions, procedures and traditions frequently conflicted with conservative beliefs, particularly since the news organizations saw themselves as reporting the independent truth. So the Republicans began to develop their own news channels.

This news channel development took two routes. The first was the Fundamentalist Christian route. They operated through their churches, bookstores, and more recently their specialized radio and TV stations. These were both self-financing and were a way to cut the true believers off from the rest of the media world.

The second route is newer. It is the takeover and control of what were previously normal news distribution outlets. It includes the establishment of the Washington Times, its takeover of United Press International, and the creation of the FOX TV channels. These were more purely political. But with these sources as a base, the conservatives have moved on to try to take over the rest of the media - or at least to force it to act more conservative.

The growth of these conservative channels was accompanied by the massive attack on the rest of the media for its' liberal bias. Since there is no liberal hierarchical organization to feel threatened and respond, this pincer movement on the mainstream media was not responded to. Since the mainstream media was also under massive economic pressure, they caved in to much of the political pressure. They were already losing audience/readers anyway. Perhaps the conservatives could replace the ones they were losing.

My reaction to these things.

Enter the blogosphere, stage left. No one else was responding to the rather massive attack on the media from the political and religious right. The right-wing top-down hierarchical corporate anti-democratic anti-Union anti-woman and anti-minority views do not represent me, nor do they represent what I think the Anglo-Saxon history, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the (small “d”) democratic history of America have given us. The Right-wingers want to take democracy, Human Rights, freedom and opportunity away from those of us who are not heads of corporations or their equivalent. Today it is my opinion that American politics and the American media are becoming less American and more authoritarian. After Reagan and Bush 41, Clinton was a Godsend. AL Gore was the logical savior of the American Dream.

Then Bush 43, Jeb Bush and the U.S. Supreme Court stole the election in Florida in 2000. There were enough news stories to show that the most likely outcome of any real recount statewide was a decision for Gore. But there were no real news follow-ups.

I did not know anyone - or even know of very many people who I trusted who agreed with me. But no one ever disproved the reports from Greg Palast or even discussed them. It was an effective tie, the Florida courts went for a recount, and the Federal Supreme Count decided, by a five to four decision on very weak grounds, to shut down any recount. Then they did it with a decision in which they specifically stated in their decision could not be used as a precedent for any future Supreme Court decisions. No law. No precedent. Just an arbitrary decision in which they were not willing to say it was a precedent for future decisions. That was a decision outside the Constitution and the law if there ever was one. That one incident told America what to expect from the Bush 43 administration and the movement conservatives. The major news organizations effectively ignored all this. They might have started some digging, but 9/11 shut that down.

The news I got from the newspapers, TV news and the newsweekly magazines let these issues drop. But something was really missing. I started searching the Internet for better news and analysis to explain what had happened.

I quickly found Talking Points Memo, Digby's Hullabaloo, daily KOS, Kevin Drum and Billmon. They all pointed me towards the smaller news items that reflected the really important events. Each time I found something that was interesting I would file it away or go Google for similar news reports. What I was doing (but didn't realize it then) was establishing some new narratives for myself, narratives not supported by the mainstream media or the two main political parties. I'm still doing that.

The sites I went back to provided analysis and sources rather than insults and politically inspired rhetoric. The analysis I found on the Internet let me work on the narratives that the mainstream media was glossing over. To my surprise, those sources have also been feeding back into the mainstream media and letting them know that important stories were being overlooked.

I think that is going to be the future of the blogosphere. It will not replace the major news media, even as that news media continues its economic decline. But the Blogosphere is going to play much the same role of evaluating the reporting of the major media and truth-squadding the rhetoric put out by the two major parties.

Most people won't bother with the blogosphere. It's too much work and takes too much time. But for the people who want that level of information and analysis, it has no real competition. There is no effective barrier to entry for any contributor. No paycheck, so you can't be fired. No editor to hold up publication of your best work. Blogger lets anyone establish a blog for publishing. Getting attention means having something (hopefully worthwhile) to say on subjects that other people want to know about, and getting on the search engines. Traffic and referrals provide an indication of when something is worth looking at. With all of that providing date, most of my time has been trying to learn enough to judge what is and is not reasonable.

To recycle the excellent quotation from Glenn Greenwald's article:

I have to say that a remarkably intimate, yet expansive, community of thought seems to be forming across television, film, and the Internet. There's a rather quiet, yet intense, movement of thought and expression building. It focuses not so much on any particular ideology ("right" or "left"), but on a common, critical-mass thirst to dispel the deception, irrationality, and utter hubris that has been corroding our proud country for what seems like an eternity.

An undeniable intellectual and social confluence is rapidly gaining momentum and solidarity. This solidarity is amazingly organic, not hierarchical -- its only guide is the sixth sense of skepticism, outrage, and, yes, reason. It transcends party. It is oceanic, atmospheric. An intellectual, moral, societal, and psychological gestalt as ancient as humanity itself, kept underfoot by a long winter, but indelibly germinating once again with the thaw.

It is literally everywhere now. The voices of blindness and rage cannot shake me anymore. I haven't felt such hope in a very long time.

I think there is something to that. I'm not sure what it is yet, but is seems quite positive compared to the way information is currently being shut down or drowned out.

The near future should be quite interesting.

[Note: Article revised significantly for clarity and organization - April 30, 2007 9:50PM.]