“Score One for the Little Guys”

CBC’s Ira Basen has an excellent summary on the role of blogging in correcting the crumbling standards of “old media”.

[…] this time, the agents of change are not high-priced media experts or expensive new technologies. No, this time the revolution is being brought to us by a large and mostly disorganized group of men and women who spend much of their days and nights pounding away at their keyboards. They are the people who produce political web logs. Some are read only by friends and relatives, others have numbers and influence that rival those of older, more established magazines. And in this campaign, the “bloggers,” as they call themselves, have been all the rage. And their presence really does seem destined to change the course of campaign reporting, just as much as the introduction of radio, TV and spin doctors did in the last century.
[…]
There is a greater need than ever before for Big Media outlets to be at the top of their game when it comes to breaking important stories, dissecting spin, and highlighting the issues that matter to voters. But it has been a long time since Big Media has been at the top of its game. It has been riding on its reputation for too long.
The most important development to come out of the coverage of this campaign is that bloggers, and others such as the intrepid “reporters” at The Daily Show, have pulled back the curtain and revealed Big Media to be a shrunken skeleton of its former self.
Now is the time to begin rebuilding. And the mainstream would be wise to see the blogosphere not as an enemy, but as an ally in the process.

Via Heart of Canada.
Well, this doesn’t happen often – The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan in agreement with the CBC….

Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief–CBS and the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, the New York Times and bombgate, CBS’s “60 Minutes” the election–the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt. It was the yeomen of King Harry taking down the French aristocracy with new technology and rough guts. God bless the pajama-clad yeomen of America. Some day, when America is hit again, and lines go down, and media are hard to get, these bloggers and site runners and independent Internetters of all sorts will find a way to file, and get their word out, and it will be part of the saving of our country.

Both are good reads.
Jeff Jarvis has a useful observation.

Last night, blogs (other than this one) got bombarded with traffic (shutting down this host) for a simple reason: Bloggers were telling the public what they knew. Big media was not.
How absurd is that? When did journalists get into the business of not telling their public what they know?

Bingo.
Then, of course, there remain a few slow learners.