Mainstream media vs The Net
p2p news / p2pnet: The entertainment cartels are still refusing to admit it, and they’ll ultimately pay for it. In spades. But the mainstream media are starting to get it that, thanks to the Net, we the people now have equal access to the only currency that’s actually worth anything.
Information.
Thanks to p2p, web sites, blogs and the various associated hard- and software technologies, the national and international dissemination of news and data is no longer the exclusive prerogative of the corporate media, largely controlled in one way or another by entertainment industry conglomerates.
Ownership notwithstanding, they (the media) are increasingly being forced to acknowledge they’re no longer the only games in town.
As a clip from a New York Times article puts it in a long article, “the power of blogs is exponential; blog posts can be linked and replicated instantly across the Web, creating a snowball effect that often breaks through to the mainstream media. Moreover, blogs have a longer shelf life than most traditional news media articles. A newspaper reporter’s original article is likely to disappear from the free Web site after a few days and become inaccessible unless purchased from the newspaper’s archives, while the blogger’s version of events remains available forever.”
And that’s what it’s all about.
By way of example, the mainstream, lamescream media religiously carry self-serving ‘news’ releases from the Big Four record labels claiming the sue ‘em all marketing campaign which victimizes the music industry’s own customers is both driving p2p file sharers towards corporate music download sites, and resulting in significant reductions in the numbers of people who use the p2p networks.
Neither is true. And while this kind of wildly inaccurate material is reported as though it’s reliable information from credible sources, what’s really happening goes by the board.
Or it used to.
Nowadays, the real facts and figures can, and do, show up online almost at the same instant as mainstream reports, counter-balancing the all-too-often heavily biased stories published by the traditional corporate print and electronic news outlets.
“Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, said reporting on reporters had created a kind of ‘Wild West atmosphere’ in cyberspace’,” says the NYT.
“With reporters conducting interviews more frequently by e-mail,” he said, ‘You have to start thinking a couple of moves ahead because you’re leaving a paper trail. And the truth squad mentality of some bloggers means you are apt to have your own questions thrown back at you’.”
If they were reporting honestly and accurately in the first place, they wouldn’t have to “think ahead” or worry about, “the truth squad mentality of some bloggers”.
Concludes the NYT story, “Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s senior correspondent at the Pentagon, said the traditional skills of sifting through information and presenting it in context were especially vital now because there were so many other sources of information. ‘With the Internet, with blogs, with text messages, with soldiers writing their own accounts from the front lines, so many people are trying to shape things into their own reality,’ he said. ‘I don’t worry so much anymore about finding out every little detail five minutes before someone else. It’s more important that we take that information and tell you what it means’.”‘
Also See:
New York Times – Answering Back to the News Media, Using the Internet, January 2, 2006
