Sunday, May 01, 2005

"Old media" vs. "new media"

Hannibal has written a succinct summary of the topic.

If you follow US politics and opinion journalism even peripherally, then you know that the one thing that the entire political spectrum--right, center, and left--can agree on is that the American news media is in trouble. Of course, pundits from different ends of the spectrum disagree on their diagnoses of the problem and on their prescriptions for a cure. If you listen to the left, the success of Fox News, talk radio, and Sinclair Broadcasting has not only polluted the waters of political discourse, but it has also motivated less openly partisan news outlets like CNN and Time to move to the right in search of an audience. The right, for its part, never misses an opportunity to decry the bias of the so-called "MSM," an acronym that used to mean one thing in HIV/AIDS public health circles but has now come to mean "mainstream media."

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