Jurassic Press: Blogs vs. Mainstream Media

The Economist devotes its latest survey (reproduced in full here) to “New Media”—blogs, wikis, podcasts—and reaches this, among several hopeful (or dire, depending on where you stand) conclusions: “ The mainstream media are in a good position to get things wrong.” It’s a quote by David Weinberger, the blogger’s blogger. Case in point: “many people in the traditional media,” the Economist’s Andreas Kluth writes, “are pessimistic about the rise of a participatory culture, either because they believe it threatens the business model that they have grown used to, or because they feel it threatens public discourse, civility and even democracy.” It’d be silly to deny the torrential excesses of bad manners online, but just as silly to consider it any more or less torrential than the tenor of manners on the average city street. It’s more relevant to ask: who appointed the mainstream media the Praetorian Guard of manners online? But these media are being outrun by a corrective (and a collective) they’ve yet to grasp. The trouble with mainstream media of late is an excess of civility, and pseudo-civility at that. Read the rest...