There were big anti-terror/pro-democracy demonstrations in Baghdad today. Glenn Reynolds points out they were noticed grudgingly, when at all, by the ‘professional’ ‘media’. A few years ago this would have meant the story didn’t exist.
Times change.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
They don’t control the horizontal and the vertical anymoreDecember 12th, 2003 |
 9 comments to They don’t control the horizontal and the vertical anymore |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
But they still control the beam gun!
The traditional role of the press – the ‘fourth estate’ – was to monitor the powers that be, in particular the government, for abuse and misuse of power.
Of course, the various news media themselves became a part of the established power system – and now someone needs to watch them.
Bloggers are the new fifth estate.
Sometimes it’s the sin of omission, like ignoring the Iraqi protests.
Sometimes it’s deliberate distortion to make an ideological point.
And sometimes it’s nothing more than the overinflated self importance of a columnist, whose crudely expressed opinions and misattributions are given undue weight simply because he’s been given a very public place to rant.
But as this post points out, they can’t get away with it any more. The fifth estate is on their ass.
The blogs from all sides of the aisle covered this quite well, usually better than Glenn Reynolds did. As verbal as Glenn was about it though, it did earn an extra bit of attention from other sites doing a little fact checking.
Yes, but _The Times_ doesn’t….
The traditional role of the press – the ‘fourth estate’ – was to monitor the powers that be, in particular the government, for abuse and misuse of power.
…
Bloggers are the new fifth estate.
And all this time I thought the role of the media was to sell newspapers and the role of the blogger was to score page hits !
Golly I feel quite humble now.
Ian just busted two estates in just one sentence!
I wish I could be as economical with language …
I just noticed that Le Monde gave the story about 1/4 (of one of their small) pages. I would have noticed earlier, but I can never read Le Monde until I’ve had a bit of vin.
It was rather prominent positioning, on the first page of their international section (page 4).
Naturally, they made it clear that the demos were by no means strictly ‘pro-US’ – but they did label them as ‘anti-terrorist’ and ‘pro-unity’ and certainly gave them appropriately significant coverage – unlike most US and UK outlets.
There is no fifth estate. Bloggers are just part of the fourth estate with currently small circulations.
I’ve published a newspaper (unsubsidized student monthly). Once you hit about 10k in circulation you are considered a legitimate press outlet and can get movie advertising and other traditional ads. Not a lot of bloggers hit that mark but for those that do, they would certainly deserve accreditation as legitimate press.
I have no doubt that some Washington blogger will one day be in the White House press corps.
An interesting idea. Perhaps we should look into getting our accreditation. If it is a mere issue of “circulation of 10000” I think we could easily make a case for a readership far in excess of that.
Let us be clear though. Even an accredited Samizdata is not the same as the professional media. We’re independant because we are doing this because we’re tired of not hearing our side of the story; of hearing facts which we (in our various actual professional capacities) are aware of distorted, ignored or misunderstood. We’re tired of getting our news from people whose education was severely limited. People who couldn’t explain an Integral, or actually understand what the Second Law really means; who don’t know squat about demographic curves, don’t have a clue what nanotechnology is, have the economics knowledge of a low-grade retard, who think balance is airing a Face On Mars author opposite a JPL scientist. And so forth.
There is a sense in which you are correct though. The existing media business and journalism cadre has had a pretty good lock on the business for some time. I think there has been a serious failure to serve the market and the blogosphere has been as explosive as it has been because it is a corrective to that market distortion.
Perhaps one day Samizdata will become a media conglomerate with highly paid (HA!!) journalists delivering news from a libertarian perspective… but if it gets too stuffed up its own arse, there will be a new blog on the block to tell us how to buy a cheap proctoscope on eBay.