“When a dozen dead tree newspapers determined the agenda, the media’s chief power lay in not reporting a story…”
27 Replies to “How Blogs Changed Everything”
“It’s true that bloggers, being human, are as prone to cruelty, stupidity and error as anyone else. But it has never been easier to go elsewhere: more people are reading more news and comment than at any time in history.”
But I’ve found that at many blogs, dissenting opinions and even facts are not welcome,and one has to wade through a swamp full of vitriol to even recognize the original debate,if it even exists anymore.
Many people DO “go elsewhere” but don’t seem to do much once they get there,except make personal attacks on the people with whom they disagree.
SDA still carries on some of the best debates on the internet,though, despite the efforts of trolls.
The power of blogs like SDA can be quantified.
Yesterday I posted a link to a poll that was skewed by standard leftist activist’s.
When I posted the poll result’s, the anti everything crowd was leading the poll by 80% to 20% over the common sense crowd.
As of today, the common sense crowd had taken the lead by the exact 80% to 20%.
The readers looking at the poll results no longer believe that most Canadians are against energy independence.
That my friends, is taking power from the latte liberal press and giving it to the people.
Hannan makes some good points here, but he is way too kind to the journalism industry. These creeps collude every day to hide news that is unfavorable to the left. In the “Journolist” scandal, lefty reporters at most of the big news outlets lied, cheated, and stole to help Obama’s candidacy. They are still doing it for his Presidency. About the only value of American Old Media these days is to see what the latest Democrat talking points are, and the DNC website has that for free.
I see Blogs as a place of comment not conversation.. Any given agenda and all the paid (or not) little fingers make it impossible to get past the glib stereotypes we are all slandered with..
Discount opinions delivered with a can of gasoline..
I read opinions with a grain of salt.. I see trolls as a indication of being correct and powerful / persuasive.. Let them stay, let them read and be schooled but dont give them the time of day.. No sunlight for the little wallflower..
Outsmarting a empty head, changing a mind that has no place in your ranks.. I ask you why?
Seeing as we are correct in our thinking its only right that they come to us.. This buoys our media while it starves their own.. I wonder how the CBC comment section is doing these days.. Its to bad they ARE NOT WORTH THE CLICK TO FIND OUT..
Hit them where it hurts.. Take what they have.. Make them, make us the media giants we deserve to be..
Don’t forget to support FreeDominion even with the smallest donation as only 5 days left to raise $25,000 for their legal fight.
Most media, and this can include forums like HufPo for example, are an entertainment product, specifically slanted to appeal to the user group the site owners wish to attract. In many cases that can be dictated by those who fund the site.
It’s all too easy to label someone you disagree with as a ‘troll’. Labeling people doesn’t foster better communication or encourage different viewpoints. It’s also too easy for some to attack the messenger when they don’t agree with the message but lack the understanding of the subject to refute an opinion with referenced facts.
I certainly concur with Mkelley’s view that Hannan is much too kind to the “dead
tree media” (a very nice phrase). As a young man I lived through the Kennedy era,
and remember how John Kennedy was depicted as a paragon of health and of family
virtue. I could hardly believe it when his ill-health and womanising became known
His foolish murders of South Vietnamese leaders was passed over as somehow
demonstrating shrewdness in foreign policy, and his irresolution at the
Bay of Pigs was also glossed over. Where Obama makes a speech, John Kennedy
would take a walk (supposedly long) on a beach near the “Kennedy Compound”,
with a photographer, and be photographed looking deeply concerned.
And then, speaking of the dead tree media, there was Walter Duranty. And yet the
NYT still pretends to be a reliable source of news!
Haven’t bought a paper in over five years, wonderful thing this internet. Another factor is the Canadian communities that produce news print. If you live in one and don’t see the writing on the wall for your properties value down the road, your going to get what you deserve.
The media usually lies by omission.
The CBC are masters at that. The recent Harb/Duffy/Wallin/Kenny senate fiasco is a prime example. Justin’s farce of pro-active disclosure is another. There are literally hundreds of similar cases.
Today the CBC has been featuring an article about the PM’s trip to South Korea. The byline says, ” Prime Minister’s critics say deal could be bad for Canadian auto workers “.
Who are the critics? Well surprise, surprise, the NDP,the Council of Canadians, the Center for Policy Alternatives, and on and on. Not one comment from anyone that supports a free trade deal with South Korea.
“Lying by omission” also allows the CBC to investigate themselves for bias and come away squeaky clean. You can’t find bias in a story that was never written.
FIRE.THEM.ALL.
I occasionally buy one of the local papers, but none of the ‘national’ rags. The internet provides an opportunity to see differing viewpoints, although many simply use it to find validation for their preconceived notions and therefore limit their viewing to only those sites that agree with their opinion. An intelligent person can synthesize and analyze information from a variety of sources, winnowing truth from fiction until a balanced understanding of the issues is achieved. For many however it’s a case of knowing how they feel and not wanting any of those preconceived notions challenged by facts.
Look at the media now, today, the main story is this Malaysia Airlines jet lost with 239 souls aboard.
It was news 3 days ago, but despite there being no new information since Friday remains front and center as if no later news of importance exists anywhere in the world.
“If it bleeds it leads”. Most media are geared to people’s emotions not their intelligence. I suppose if the media tried to appeal to intelligent readers they wouldn’t find enough people to sustain it. Besides the advertisers don’t want to attract intelligent people, they want stupid, easily manipulated sheeple to buy their crap. The ‘news’ is merely a vehicle for marketing.
Blogs such as Kate’s SDA also give us “Rubes” a voice that we would otherwise never have or deserve as far as the MSM is concerned.
You are right, of course. But, I really wish our Pravda media would have honestly covered Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and the IRS scandals instead of covering them as though they were all non-stories.
I recall reading a first-hand perspective of life in the Soviet Union a while back – according to her, everyone knew that Pravda was pure propaganda, but you read it anyway; the real news was what they weren’t printing.
It’s a shame that the American media still looks at the Soviet Union as a goal, rather than the runaway horror story that it was.
Mkelley, you are bang on, and the MSM print and television are attempting to do the same thing here in Canada today by promoting the Shiny Pony and slamming PM Harper on a daily basis.
The alternate media is reforming or dissolving the old media monopolies. It’s a great time for the citizen-journalist.
That’s true, however politically polarized blogs often just preach to the converted and personally insult anyone who doesn’t agree. If it reinforces ignorant stereotypes it’s not accomplishing much of anything meaningful, and might actually be counterproductive.
Did & done. as bloggers we have to support those that are taking the flak so we can say what we mean.
Nice of you to remind me of their plight.So many are under this cloud of anti democratic PC stupidity. We cannot allow the enemies of freedom to win.
In an entropic Universe you have to sacrifice to keep liberty from the claws of breakdown by the usual merchants of chaos.
One of the best internet news posting forums is Yahoo. BOTH sides of an issue are discussed, virtually no moderation, and the ad hominem trolling is minimal. There’s more discussion of CBC articles there than on the CBC website.
In fact, the dialectic element of blogging ensures a higher standard of accuracy than before.
It’s great to see the word “dialectic” being used. All too often it’s conflated with “debate” or “argument”. There is a subtle but important difference.
It’s like this,
Blogs are the most magnificent representation of free expression. Those that make living manufacturing news don’t like since they can’t control it.
Blogs mostly do opposite of the imaginary things mass media do.
You get a jack ass, you get a wise guy, you get somebody who weights the pros and cons and you get all kinds.
The thing about it is that there is something in what the jack ass has to say if you eliminate jack assiness. There is something what the wise guy or wise lady says and you eliminate the wiseness.
You may think that there is the truth in there somewhere.
People here have their own opinion and weigh things and know much more than those that follow an ideology. The ideology maybe of varied sort. If you listen to one source you are probably what they call LIV.
There is this a commentator that is from the north, telling others that they should be fair and balanced.
While that is desirable, there is not need to be constantly reminded of this.
Comments are written for a reason. Commenter’s reason.
There comments are, for the most part (an assumption) by grownups.
There are some comments that are clearly juvenile most likely by juvenile commenters, not necessarily young, just juvenile thinking. They have not grown up yet in the hard knocks of life, they think that life is the way someone else tells them it is.
Blogs are a necessity of today’s life.
Blogs are where real independent people tell others how it is.
Some time it works out, other time it does not.
Well, what the hell.
Ps.
Must thank Ms. Kate that she let’s the bits fall where they will. There may not be that many blogs that will allow it. As peter j commented on The Telegraphs article.
Access to the SOURCE of information, is the true value of effective Blogs.
Poorer showings demonstrate the lazy, incomplete arguments put forth by triflers, the hate everything crowd.
In the future, the date of the demise of the dead tree media will likely be given as Nov 2009 when the Climategate emails were released. I downloaded those from the Russian ftp server while it was still up and the initial discussion regarding these emails was whether they had been faked or not. The singular aspect of this whole event was the total lack of mention of the dead tree media to mention what we now know was the most significant event in starting the destruction of the world wide kleptocracy and totalitarian state planned by the UN under the guise of CAGW. This was the news event of the century and they missed it.
I still recall clearly unpacking the document and viewing thousand upon thousand emails and wondering is this the gift we’ve been waiting for or is this a clever false flag operation to tie up the best minds in the anti-CAGW crowd for months poring through the documents? My personal concentration was on the FORTRAN code given how many years I’d spent programming in that language and it seemed legitimate. There was an explanatory file for the code which documented all of the inconsistencies and frustrations a programmer new to the code had encountered in attempting to merely duplicate the previous results. This rang very true and I was convinced that climate realists had been given a weapon to destroy the Potemkin village of CAGW and we did.
The MSM didn’t report the existence of the climategate emails for a month or more and, during that time, a crowdsourced analysis of the contents of the data was already available to readers of WUWT and climateaudit. Errors in the code used to compute historical climate had been posted and when the MSM suddenly reported this “theft”, they had shown that they were less useful than tits on a bull.
From Nov 2009 onward I have not read a newspaper, have not watched any TV, don’t listen to radio stations and my entire news is gleaned from online sources. The trick to getting ones news online is to use reputable sources and to know the bias inherent in each source. WUWT is an excellent and balanced source of climate news. SDA is a similarly excellent source of political news and, given that SDA has nowhere near the volume of material that one gets on WUWT, SDA serves as a good jumping off point to access other sites. zerohedge is a source I’m using more and more as the world nears the financial cliff.
What I find interesting now is that most of the topics I bring up in discussion regarding current world events are met by puzzled glances whereas I haven’t a clue about topics, that individuals who rely on the MSM, bring up. Almost invariably these are hysterical over-reactions to some trivial event or utterly banal as to whom some actor/actress I’ve never heard of is sleeping with now and speculations about the potential performance of a sports team I barely recall hearing about years ago. At the local hospital, I’ve had one good political discussion with a new physician, and I expect we’ll be seeing more of each other as it turns out we’re both regular readers of zerohedge.
Just like dinosaurs didn’t disappear overnight, the MSM deadtree media will continue for those who can’t imagine getting their news in any other way than from a newspaper or a tightly scripted TV channel. I’m sure there were many millions of Russian LIV’s during the era of the USSR who believed that what Pravda printed was the truth. The MSM now serves primarily as the propaganda arm of the current statist government or, in the case of the CBC in Canada, the propaganda arm of the communist opposition the existence of which is completely incomprehensible. PMSH should have squashed these statist cockroaches early in his term and by the end of his term their demise would be forgotten by the LIV’s.
Thanks! The left thinks we are the 1% but, judging from the contributions so far, most of us are not rich at all. Any ideas of where else I can go to publicize the need for more contributions to FreeDominion as their deadline loams?
“It’s true that bloggers, being human, are as prone to cruelty, stupidity and error as anyone else. But it has never been easier to go elsewhere: more people are reading more news and comment than at any time in history.”
But I’ve found that at many blogs, dissenting opinions and even facts are not welcome,and one has to wade through a swamp full of vitriol to even recognize the original debate,if it even exists anymore.
Many people DO “go elsewhere” but don’t seem to do much once they get there,except make personal attacks on the people with whom they disagree.
SDA still carries on some of the best debates on the internet,though, despite the efforts of trolls.
The power of blogs like SDA can be quantified.
Yesterday I posted a link to a poll that was skewed by standard leftist activist’s.
When I posted the poll result’s, the anti everything crowd was leading the poll by 80% to 20% over the common sense crowd.
As of today, the common sense crowd had taken the lead by the exact 80% to 20%.
The readers looking at the poll results no longer believe that most Canadians are against energy independence.
That my friends, is taking power from the latte liberal press and giving it to the people.
Hannan makes some good points here, but he is way too kind to the journalism industry. These creeps collude every day to hide news that is unfavorable to the left. In the “Journolist” scandal, lefty reporters at most of the big news outlets lied, cheated, and stole to help Obama’s candidacy. They are still doing it for his Presidency. About the only value of American Old Media these days is to see what the latest Democrat talking points are, and the DNC website has that for free.
I see Blogs as a place of comment not conversation.. Any given agenda and all the paid (or not) little fingers make it impossible to get past the glib stereotypes we are all slandered with..
Discount opinions delivered with a can of gasoline..
I read opinions with a grain of salt.. I see trolls as a indication of being correct and powerful / persuasive.. Let them stay, let them read and be schooled but dont give them the time of day.. No sunlight for the little wallflower..
Outsmarting a empty head, changing a mind that has no place in your ranks.. I ask you why?
Seeing as we are correct in our thinking its only right that they come to us.. This buoys our media while it starves their own.. I wonder how the CBC comment section is doing these days.. Its to bad they ARE NOT WORTH THE CLICK TO FIND OUT..
Hit them where it hurts.. Take what they have.. Make them, make us the media giants we deserve to be..
Don’t forget to support FreeDominion even with the smallest donation as only 5 days left to raise $25,000 for their legal fight.
Most media, and this can include forums like HufPo for example, are an entertainment product, specifically slanted to appeal to the user group the site owners wish to attract. In many cases that can be dictated by those who fund the site.
It’s all too easy to label someone you disagree with as a ‘troll’. Labeling people doesn’t foster better communication or encourage different viewpoints. It’s also too easy for some to attack the messenger when they don’t agree with the message but lack the understanding of the subject to refute an opinion with referenced facts.
I certainly concur with Mkelley’s view that Hannan is much too kind to the “dead
tree media” (a very nice phrase). As a young man I lived through the Kennedy era,
and remember how John Kennedy was depicted as a paragon of health and of family
virtue. I could hardly believe it when his ill-health and womanising became known
His foolish murders of South Vietnamese leaders was passed over as somehow
demonstrating shrewdness in foreign policy, and his irresolution at the
Bay of Pigs was also glossed over. Where Obama makes a speech, John Kennedy
would take a walk (supposedly long) on a beach near the “Kennedy Compound”,
with a photographer, and be photographed looking deeply concerned.
And then, speaking of the dead tree media, there was Walter Duranty. And yet the
NYT still pretends to be a reliable source of news!
Haven’t bought a paper in over five years, wonderful thing this internet. Another factor is the Canadian communities that produce news print. If you live in one and don’t see the writing on the wall for your properties value down the road, your going to get what you deserve.
The media usually lies by omission.
The CBC are masters at that. The recent Harb/Duffy/Wallin/Kenny senate fiasco is a prime example. Justin’s farce of pro-active disclosure is another. There are literally hundreds of similar cases.
Today the CBC has been featuring an article about the PM’s trip to South Korea. The byline says, ” Prime Minister’s critics say deal could be bad for Canadian auto workers “.
Who are the critics? Well surprise, surprise, the NDP,the Council of Canadians, the Center for Policy Alternatives, and on and on. Not one comment from anyone that supports a free trade deal with South Korea.
“Lying by omission” also allows the CBC to investigate themselves for bias and come away squeaky clean. You can’t find bias in a story that was never written.
FIRE.THEM.ALL.
I occasionally buy one of the local papers, but none of the ‘national’ rags. The internet provides an opportunity to see differing viewpoints, although many simply use it to find validation for their preconceived notions and therefore limit their viewing to only those sites that agree with their opinion. An intelligent person can synthesize and analyze information from a variety of sources, winnowing truth from fiction until a balanced understanding of the issues is achieved. For many however it’s a case of knowing how they feel and not wanting any of those preconceived notions challenged by facts.
Look at the media now, today, the main story is this Malaysia Airlines jet lost with 239 souls aboard.
It was news 3 days ago, but despite there being no new information since Friday remains front and center as if no later news of importance exists anywhere in the world.
“If it bleeds it leads”. Most media are geared to people’s emotions not their intelligence. I suppose if the media tried to appeal to intelligent readers they wouldn’t find enough people to sustain it. Besides the advertisers don’t want to attract intelligent people, they want stupid, easily manipulated sheeple to buy their crap. The ‘news’ is merely a vehicle for marketing.
Blogs such as Kate’s SDA also give us “Rubes” a voice that we would otherwise never have or deserve as far as the MSM is concerned.
You are right, of course. But, I really wish our Pravda media would have honestly covered Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and the IRS scandals instead of covering them as though they were all non-stories.
I recall reading a first-hand perspective of life in the Soviet Union a while back – according to her, everyone knew that Pravda was pure propaganda, but you read it anyway; the real news was what they weren’t printing.
It’s a shame that the American media still looks at the Soviet Union as a goal, rather than the runaway horror story that it was.
Mkelley, you are bang on, and the MSM print and television are attempting to do the same thing here in Canada today by promoting the Shiny Pony and slamming PM Harper on a daily basis.
The alternate media is reforming or dissolving the old media monopolies. It’s a great time for the citizen-journalist.
That’s true, however politically polarized blogs often just preach to the converted and personally insult anyone who doesn’t agree. If it reinforces ignorant stereotypes it’s not accomplishing much of anything meaningful, and might actually be counterproductive.
Did & done. as bloggers we have to support those that are taking the flak so we can say what we mean.
Nice of you to remind me of their plight.So many are under this cloud of anti democratic PC stupidity. We cannot allow the enemies of freedom to win.
In an entropic Universe you have to sacrifice to keep liberty from the claws of breakdown by the usual merchants of chaos.
One of the best internet news posting forums is Yahoo. BOTH sides of an issue are discussed, virtually no moderation, and the ad hominem trolling is minimal. There’s more discussion of CBC articles there than on the CBC website.
In fact, the dialectic element of blogging ensures a higher standard of accuracy than before.
It’s great to see the word “dialectic” being used. All too often it’s conflated with “debate” or “argument”. There is a subtle but important difference.
Yep some news spreads fast…..not just lies…..
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/07/friday-funny-great-moments-in-environmentalism-the-2-million-kxl-comments-real-or-fake/
It’s like this,
Blogs are the most magnificent representation of free expression. Those that make living manufacturing news don’t like since they can’t control it.
Blogs mostly do opposite of the imaginary things mass media do.
You get a jack ass, you get a wise guy, you get somebody who weights the pros and cons and you get all kinds.
The thing about it is that there is something in what the jack ass has to say if you eliminate jack assiness. There is something what the wise guy or wise lady says and you eliminate the wiseness.
You may think that there is the truth in there somewhere.
People here have their own opinion and weigh things and know much more than those that follow an ideology. The ideology maybe of varied sort. If you listen to one source you are probably what they call LIV.
There is this a commentator that is from the north, telling others that they should be fair and balanced.
While that is desirable, there is not need to be constantly reminded of this.
Comments are written for a reason. Commenter’s reason.
There comments are, for the most part (an assumption) by grownups.
There are some comments that are clearly juvenile most likely by juvenile commenters, not necessarily young, just juvenile thinking. They have not grown up yet in the hard knocks of life, they think that life is the way someone else tells them it is.
Blogs are a necessity of today’s life.
Blogs are where real independent people tell others how it is.
Some time it works out, other time it does not.
Well, what the hell.
Ps.
Must thank Ms. Kate that she let’s the bits fall where they will. There may not be that many blogs that will allow it. As peter j commented on The Telegraphs article.
Access to the SOURCE of information, is the true value of effective Blogs.
Poorer showings demonstrate the lazy, incomplete arguments put forth by triflers, the hate everything crowd.
In the future, the date of the demise of the dead tree media will likely be given as Nov 2009 when the Climategate emails were released. I downloaded those from the Russian ftp server while it was still up and the initial discussion regarding these emails was whether they had been faked or not. The singular aspect of this whole event was the total lack of mention of the dead tree media to mention what we now know was the most significant event in starting the destruction of the world wide kleptocracy and totalitarian state planned by the UN under the guise of CAGW. This was the news event of the century and they missed it.
I still recall clearly unpacking the document and viewing thousand upon thousand emails and wondering is this the gift we’ve been waiting for or is this a clever false flag operation to tie up the best minds in the anti-CAGW crowd for months poring through the documents? My personal concentration was on the FORTRAN code given how many years I’d spent programming in that language and it seemed legitimate. There was an explanatory file for the code which documented all of the inconsistencies and frustrations a programmer new to the code had encountered in attempting to merely duplicate the previous results. This rang very true and I was convinced that climate realists had been given a weapon to destroy the Potemkin village of CAGW and we did.
The MSM didn’t report the existence of the climategate emails for a month or more and, during that time, a crowdsourced analysis of the contents of the data was already available to readers of WUWT and climateaudit. Errors in the code used to compute historical climate had been posted and when the MSM suddenly reported this “theft”, they had shown that they were less useful than tits on a bull.
From Nov 2009 onward I have not read a newspaper, have not watched any TV, don’t listen to radio stations and my entire news is gleaned from online sources. The trick to getting ones news online is to use reputable sources and to know the bias inherent in each source. WUWT is an excellent and balanced source of climate news. SDA is a similarly excellent source of political news and, given that SDA has nowhere near the volume of material that one gets on WUWT, SDA serves as a good jumping off point to access other sites. zerohedge is a source I’m using more and more as the world nears the financial cliff.
What I find interesting now is that most of the topics I bring up in discussion regarding current world events are met by puzzled glances whereas I haven’t a clue about topics, that individuals who rely on the MSM, bring up. Almost invariably these are hysterical over-reactions to some trivial event or utterly banal as to whom some actor/actress I’ve never heard of is sleeping with now and speculations about the potential performance of a sports team I barely recall hearing about years ago. At the local hospital, I’ve had one good political discussion with a new physician, and I expect we’ll be seeing more of each other as it turns out we’re both regular readers of zerohedge.
Just like dinosaurs didn’t disappear overnight, the MSM deadtree media will continue for those who can’t imagine getting their news in any other way than from a newspaper or a tightly scripted TV channel. I’m sure there were many millions of Russian LIV’s during the era of the USSR who believed that what Pravda printed was the truth. The MSM now serves primarily as the propaganda arm of the current statist government or, in the case of the CBC in Canada, the propaganda arm of the communist opposition the existence of which is completely incomprehensible. PMSH should have squashed these statist cockroaches early in his term and by the end of his term their demise would be forgotten by the LIV’s.
Thanks! The left thinks we are the 1% but, judging from the contributions so far, most of us are not rich at all. Any ideas of where else I can go to publicize the need for more contributions to FreeDominion as their deadline loams?
Sorry, that should be deadline looms..