Newsrooms under siege

Philadelphia Inquirer ^ | 9/9/04 | Edward Wasserman

[2Jedismom]

a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors

I LOVE IT! Better than "vast right wing conspiracy" even!

Jim, you oughta put this on the homepage somewhere!

Main Entry: cad·re
Pronunciation: 'ka-"drA, 'kä-, -drE; esp British 'kä-d&(r), 'kA-, -dr&
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Italian quadro, from Latin quadrum square -- more at QUARREL
1 : FRAME, FRAMEWORK
2 : a nucleus or core group especially of trained personnel able to assume control and to train others; broadly : a group of people having some unifying relationship <a cadre of lawyers>
3 : a cell of indoctrinated leaders active in promoting the interests of a revolutionary party
4 : a member of a cadre

[2Jedismom]

Moreover, where Free Republic stands head and shoulders over even the best of the webloggers, is that it has a democratic self-correcting mechanism -- the threads. People here have a real instinct for what is news. When an article is posted, other FReepers will read it carefully for bias and comment on any unfair word usage, prejudiced selection of information or other spin. If there is an outright inaccuracy in the article, FReepers will jump all over it to correct the mistakes. What we are doing here is a transparent collection and dissemination of the news in real time.

Amen. And guess what...I homeschool my jedis and I'm teaching them to do the same thing. We've already discussed the forgery situation at LENGTH this morning...even my five-year-old gets the gist.

[TomServo]

Dear MSM,

  You're now irrelevant.

  Deal with it.

 

Signed,

    John Q. Public

[haywoodwebb]

"If Fox made stuff up, we would see a spate of articles about Fox's sloppy reporting. I can't recall a single one."

Oh, they've tried to call Brit Hume on quite a few . . .

Everytime they do, he exposes their error and they quietly slink away.

[Leatherneck_MT]

Not a "Rightest Warrior"

But I am a Warrior for the Right.

[Richard Kimball]

Today, even if the media were to turn overnight into a fair and balanced vehicle, I think it is too late. By their failures, they have created a viable alternative to their closed system, and information flow will never be the same.

Well, to quote John Kerry, "I agreed with your statement before I disagreed with it." The collapse of the big media networks and newspapers was as predictable as the collapse of the buggy whip industry. It would have happened no matter how well they tried to do their job. When cable TV became popular, it became impossible for entertainment networks to dominate ratings, no matter how well they programmed. There were just too many other choices. Dittos for the news networks. Why do I need CBS to tell me what Al Jazeera is saying, when I can go to Al Jazeera's web site and find out for myself? Where I agree with you is that by shamelessly shilling for the Socialist/Marxist point of view, and trying to silence all voices that disagreed with them, they greatly accelerated the growth of alternative media. However, their decline and fall was inevitable, no matter how "fair and balanced" they were.