A Jeffersonian In East Texas

Ok, you can accuse me of being as late with this update as the print media, and TV coverage, but I have been busy, and news is not my livelihood.

I sat up late several nights as the main stream media covered the death of a couple of our media icons ad nauseum, but I was not engaged in such important pursuits, I was engaged in something the media considered far less important. I was wasting my time online getting fresh updates from Iranian dissidents as they went to the streets of Iran’s major cities protesting the results of the presidential election. This news came to us in real time, as blow by blow accounts, many from the dissidents themselves!

As a side note, and in a related story, the main stream media might want to start watching the skies over Jordan and Iraq, they will in all likelihood soon be host to Israeli jets headed to Iranian nuclear sites! Also watch for streams of Iranians headed toward the Afghan and Iraqi borders.

Newspapers are dying,! Well, at least the print versions. Who killed them? Well, according to Les Hinton, the Dow Jones chief exec, it is Google!  Matthew Flamm, reported.  According to the story, Hinton equated Google to a “digital vampire”, sucking the life blood from the print media! More bellow:>>

Sorry Mr. Hinton, this was not a murder, it was a suicide! The autopsy results are in, and the wounds were self inflicted. TV and radio could learn some valuable lessons here as well:

• The main stream media has long determined what’s news, and what’s not, and were able to shape the events of the world, and the way people looked at them by suppression and exaggeration. Digital media has been able to allow individuals to have that choice.
• They were as unprepared for digital media as scribes were for the printing press.
• The speed with which digital media is able to “scoop” print media makes last nights news obsolete by the time a daily newspaper hits the stands.
• The “democratic”  nature of the Internet offers news and views from multiple perspectives rather than the monolithic spin for which print media has become infamous.
• Interaction is possible with digital media, interaction which is far better than the watered down versions offered by newspaper “readers comment” sections.

I could go on for pages about this, but why? The people who need to hear it the most, consider the general public, of which I am a part, to be ignorant and unable to decide anything on their own!

Let us know where to send the flowers.

The “What Part of No” committee Is claiming that they have become invisible to the local newspaper. Is it possible, could a local news outlet that claims media fairness possibly be biased?

Frankly, Yes!

This is what we have come to expect from much of the main stream media. It is also why main stream media is hemorrhaging credibility like a mortgage broker, and why more and more people have come to rely on alternative news sources like blogs to get information.

They may not all be accurate, but every side will be presented, and people will have the chance to look at each view presented, and make up their own minds. Main stream media can claim fairness, but as long as they decide what is news, and what is not, they can remain biased by exclusion.