On TownHall.com’s Weekend Journal, this past weekend, in his book, The Cult of the Amateur (How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture), Andrew Keen says that blogs have managed to undermine the Mainstream Media but only to the denigration of the MSM, individuals, the internet and privacy itself (transcribed generally by me over the, oddly enough, internet):
Keen: “I say about Web 2.0: For a really intelligent honest media,” Keen insists, “you need professionals and movie-makers who can provide us with a high quality and reliable media. If you radically Democratize the media, which is what the Web 2.0 people want, you do away, in the language of Silicon Valley, with professional journalists and agents and editors and writers and gatekeepers and what I consider to be the very valuable traditional ecosystems of media. And ultimately you get chaos and you get an Oligarchy. So in my view it’s no coincidence that Aristotle and Plato placed Oligarchy close to Democracy; a balanced, managed Democracy — those are the Democracies that work. Flattened Democracies, pure Democracies don’t work.
And what you see in the Web 2.0 world is a very, very dangerous development. You see the undermining of our traditional media with its reliance on truth, accuracy — and the Blogosphere — this chaotic, anarchic, unreliable thing which undermines all the basic virtures of our traditional media.
Moderator: what about Crowd Sourcing; there’s no central authority, it’s what everybody wants and this is what we do; try to narrow this down to the root of the problem. Your problem is not with blogs per se or the internet as a vehicle for a source of information. It’s with the idea that it lacks authority, verification. Anyone can post anything and because it’s on the internet “it must be true.” As an illustration you use Wikipedia, YouTube, Craig’s List. Is the problem that anybody becomes an authority?
Keen: You nailed it, and this is a broad phenomenon, one of the battles in this war on the Blogosphere. One of my biggest critics is a fellow called David Weinberger, at Harvard, who has written a book called Everything Is Miscellaneous. He argues that knowledge is miscellaneous, that everything is relativized, there’s no way of proving anything. My biggest critics are Post Modernists. And if we do away with authority and truth, then who knows what to believe?
And that’s the Blogosphere. If we do away with authority and truth, then every opinion, every absurd argument becomes as legitimate as anything else.
Moderator: but hasn’t the Mainstream Media done the best job of undermining itself? If you look at the New York Times, the scandals involving plagiarism, you look at the Dan Rather/CBS series of the stories they ran against all evidence — to name but the merest few — should in fact the Mainstream Media be the standard in which we judge the Blogosphere? Is the Mainstream Media telling us the truth or not?
Keen: the MSM may not be ideal, it has its warts, it has its weaknesses, its scandals, but if we undermine it it’s a catastrophe. I’m all for giving the Internet a kick in the pants; what I’m against is the Internet giving it a kick elsewhere. Because if we lose the authority, and I use that word very carefully, if we lose the professional authority of the Mainstream Media, then we embrace this relativized Blogosphere. Research and professional standards go out the window.
No one knows what to believe or who to believe.
I love the internet; I use it all the time. I’m certainly not a Luddite; I don’t want to close it down. What I am saying is that it needs more professional standards. Ironically enough, with the Internet we’re really re-creating the wheel in the sense that we need to create an ecosystem where you have gatekeepers, where you have people we trust, able to tell us what’s good and what isn’t.
BZ Weighs In:
And who, might you postulate, is RESPONSIBLE for these apparently heinous states of affairs? Who has managed to hold sway over public opinion for over 50+ years? Who has only, since the mid-80s, found their voice in media venues such as talk radio, smaller publications and, most recently, the Blogosphere and FNC?
If you would ask the Left, it is the Right. If you ask the Right, it is the Left.
In truth it is the Left who existed all along because they were in power.
This interview merely confirms the breadth and depth that the MSM and the Left will go in order to express not only their “displeasure” but shock and anger that Conservatism is, only now, beginning to challenge (and EFFECTIVELY SO!) and make an inroad and a brusque intrusion into the stranglehold that the Democrat Left has historically enjoyed for decades over all forms of media in the United States.
The Democrats and the Left, pushed to the wall, (we must now realize) will and shall take any stance and employ any ruse and ploy in order to keep historic power.
Never, ever in the history of the United States, have the Left been challenged and had their thoughts and theories refuted, questioned and thrown back into their faces as now.
They are staggered, they are aghast but, believe me, they are this moment plotting Conservatism’s downfall.
Do not doubt this for a microsecond.
The only umbrage taken is that Conservatives have become so effective and so acknowledged in such a short time.
BZ
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Conservative Bloggers: A Force To Be Reckoned With!
If it weren’t for the “Blogsphere, BZ, then I, for one, wouldn’t have learned any of the positive news on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past 3 months.
This interview is a prime example of why most of us no longer watch/listen to the MSM. They simply no longer offer a balanced representation of fact. Sadly, we shall never again see the like of such journalistic heavyweights as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Kronkite, Eric Sevareid(?), et al. They presented the news and allowed us to form our own opinions based on fact, not hypothetical conjecture; which seems to be the order of the day on most MSM channels.
I view this interview as the beginning of greedy media moguls who now realize that we expect more out of the news than the leftist-promoting, illegal aliens’ promoting, anti-Military/Troops, anti-Conservative, monstrously over-the-top PC drivel we are being force-fed each day. The MSM may whine all they want, but this is of their own making.
Veritas et Fidelis Semper
Ah, when young such folks would no doubt say Question Authority! And now that they are *in* positions of authority?
Heh.
Deborah: comprehensive news indeed. And you are right; these days it’s fairly difficult to discern the news from the sham since most everything on the MSM includes “given” editorials. Too many editorials cloaked as “news” for too long has people, that in and of itself, confused and disenchanted. CBS disappointed with Katie Couric not doing well? Maybe that’s the MSM backlash for installing a pert know-nothing Editorializer into a News Niche.
And AJ: you are SO correct! The former counter-culture “Question Authority” VW Transporter-driving breed NOW disliking their OWN authority questioned? How hypocritical is that — but expected now that THEY are in power.
I see this interview as the quintessential “how dare you question OUR Left Wing wisdom” concomitant with the last-gasp attempt to keep POWER.
BZ
Fairness doctrine is the latest attempt by the left to control the media. Or rather maintain control.
Jenn: translate the Left’s tantrum to be “What?? You’re managing to do to US what we did to YOU by way of innovation and creativity? No way! We’ll have to screw you for THAT one.”
The Left knows it CANNOT accomplish ANY of its goals when left to the electorate; it has to resort to the cheating and hijacking of common sense by way of a select few bills and secular judges.
Speaking of JUDGES. . .
BZ
I love it when the left tries this crap, BZ. They can’t get away with it, but it tells us that we are doing good! The more they whine and moan the better. 🙂