The Media Cornucopia

It’s a Golden Age of media—but not for long, if the Left has its way.

And speaking of new media, Adam D. Thierer at City Journal brings us this extended article which should be required reading for His Majesty Senator Lott in order to instruct him about the ways in which the media universe has changed. For those individuals in the Washington elite who have become disconnected from the regular people, this article should be very helpful. In it, we learn how the number of media choices has exploded in recent years. Where once there were but a handful of outlets for news and information, now there are more channels of information than anyone could possibly hope to use in a lifetime. Perhaps Senator Lott should start listening to some of them.

The emergence of new media is important because it allows the voice of regular Americans to be heard on an equal playing field with traditional liberal old media. Indeed, new media regularly goes up against old media and wins significant victories, such as when bloggers discovered Dan Rather's attempt to put forth forged documents in the Rathergate memo scandal. Were it not for the Internet and the rest of new media, that story would have been taken at face value and never questioned. But because of the existence of new media, a lie and a fraud put forward by old media was quickly brought to light and CBS was discredited and shown to be offering fabricated news as fact. In the new media age it is far more difficult for old media dinosaurs to put out lies and disinformation without being caught red handed.

Most importantly, new media allows opinion and ideas to reach the public in their pure form, unfiltered by the liberal censors and their agenda. In the past, liberal media could suppress those aspects of a story, or ideas associated with it, in such a way as to spin the news in the direction that they wished. Often what was left out of a story was critical to an objective understanding of it. But today, with the availability of new media, one can get all of the information that is available about a story or issue, bypassing the liberal filters that used to "protect" us from inconvenient information that undermined the leftist world view. The beauty of the new media is that it allows a level of detail that one needs to understand the complexity of issues that we face, and not just the short sound bites that the MSM feeds us to keep us from a full understanding of events.

Becoming an informed citizen has never been easier. You can get up in the morning and still read your (probably liberal) local paper and several national ones—say, the Wall Street Journal (right-of-center editorial page) and USA Today (more or less centrist). Walk to the newsstand and you’ve got political magazines galore, from the Marxist New Left Review to the paleoconservative The American Conservative. On cable and satellite television: CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX News, PBS, local news, the big networks (at least for now), the BBC, C-SPAN, community access shows—all offer a wide variety of news and information options, some around the clock. Turn on the car radio and Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity booms out at you from the right; or maybe you can tune in to Sirius Left on satellite.

The Internet has done more to create the sort of media that scarcity critics claim to desire than any other technology. Every man, woman, and child can have a “newspaper” or broadcast outlet today—it’s called a website, blog, or podcast. It’s hard to imagine how the political blogosphere could be more diverse, ranging from the Daily Kos and the Huffington Post on the left to National Review Online and Power Line on the right to Andrew Sullivan, Instapundit, and Buzz Machine somewhere in between. A political junkie must hustle to keep up with what RealClearPolitics posts on its site every day.