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"The icons are sacred no longer. Finally, there are the bloggers: the visual or word journalist is not only overseen by a familiar hierarchy of editors or producers but by many independents who will scan, query, trade observations, and blast what they think is an error or manipulation to the entire world.

News picture-making media organizations have two paths of possible response to this unnerving new situation. First, they can stonewall, deny, delete, dismiss, counter-slur, or ignore the problem. To some extent, this is what is happening now and, ethical consideration aside, such a strategy is the practical equivalent of taking extra photos of the deck chairs on the Titanic."

Martin, this is the perfect place for your Titantic graphic arts.

In the American Revolutionary years, every man with pocket change could hire a printing press and put out a pamphlet about what he thought. In a free marketplace of ideas, you could stand on a soapbox on the town green, and shout your views as loudly as you liked. Politics were local, and you could say what you wanted to say. People might ignore you, agree with you, or pronounce you an idiot, but you had your say.

In the Media Era, politics were national and often planetary. But standing between you and the public audience were the gatekeepers who determined the agenda. Poisoned milk in Peoria? If Dan Rather didn't schedule five minutes for it, it didn't happen. Vietnam protestors? Walter Kronkite says that it gets fifteen minutes, at the top of the show. Castro kills and murders? Uncle Fidel's not getting slandered on this news report!

Enter the Internet, and the Old Ways have been blown to hell. In the truest expression of democracy, $25 for a site name buys you the biggest printingpress in the world (long as you pay the hosting fees.) And barring that, FR and other chat sites are potentially free (in the short run.) Like the Revolutionary era pamphleteers, we can once again stand in the village square and shout "That's not right!" The hallowed "fact-checking" function of the news reporter, long buryed under inches of bias-dust at the networks, has been taken over by the commoners.

And boy, are the Gatekeepers p!$$ed. The "little people" out there in the flyover states have forgotten where they fit in the food chain, and are getting uppity. Don't they know that Hollywood and New York and all the flashy News-a-tainment people are supposed to tell them what to believe?

Every man a king. And it all came out of Arpnet, a system designed to let the military and higher education share data between nodes. You gotta laugh sometimes.