Wither The Mainstream Media?

Bill Bennett has some interesting things to say about the old media, the new media and they way they are both changing.

Leonard Pitts just wrote an op-ed about the changing face of the media “All the News That’s Fit to be Requested,” bemoaning the fact that there is actually a newspaper in Chile that allows readers to choose the news. He sees that as an abdication of a newspaper’s God Given Right to set the agenda for you and me as to what is important and what is to be ignored.

Bennett has a radio talk show and makes this interesting point: …I began the top of my show two weeks ago with a menu of news items (as I always do), and I was prepared to discuss them, as well as a recent speech I had given on the meaning of the "moral values" vote in the 2004 election. I opened the phone lines and every single call--every single one--was about the Marine in Fallujah who had shot an Iraqi in a mosque, a news item I did not read in my opening menu of news.
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On the issue of credibility: …The first question asked of Internet pioneer Matt Drudge when he spoke at the National Press Club in 1998 was, "[H]ow does it advance the cause of democracy and of social good to report unfounded allegations?" He detailed several then-current failures in reporting by the mainstream media, failures that led to reporters being fired, and libel judgments being paid. It is six years later and the Internet has grown, gossip and unfounded allegations have grown with it--but the growth of "unfounded allegations" is at least as much a problem for the mainstream media as it is for the Internet.
[snip]
On the question of how people now form their opinions: …People now get their news and opinion on the Internet and relay it to talk radio. They then think about it, research it further, and discuss it on the Internet, in email, and in the national conversations that take place on shows like mine all the time--shows that cannot simply be marginalized as "right wing radio," because they are not "right wing." Some are, in part, national dialogues. Yes there is right wing radio, and yes there is left wing radio but there is radio of another sort too, and too few elites have the first clue about what it is or what is happening there.

Interesting times we live in…