Corrective Lenses

I just thought of a great metaphor for function of bloggers as I was posting a comment on Roger L. Simon's blog. Our news media have become distorting lenses on the world, as predictably as if they were made of glass. Bloggers came from the people who weren't content with that distortion and created their own corrective lenses. Factchecking the self-appointed purveyors of truth.

If Old Media want to be trusted again, they need to welcome, not resent and dismiss, the factchecking and corrective action of bloggers.

Update: Howard Kurtz notes that "blog" is becoming radioactive, at least among MSM editors. (Via Jeff Jarvis)

Reminds me of people who can't see, but are too vain to wear glasses.

Jonathan Last proves my point, although not via his blog. The existing order deals with scandals by appointing blue-ribbon commissions to "investigate" and protect the powerful. CBS thought it would work here, but all that shows is that CBS, and maybe whoever insisted that the report deny the political agenda, still doesn't get it. The MSM are like the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm; they started out championing the rights of animals against the farmers, but the rest of us are now noticing that they have taken on the characteristics of the powerful they used to complain about, e.g. Richard Nixon.

Howard Fineman's grudging acknowledgment that the party is over falls short of admitting that the liberal bias was never a good thing. Richard Nixon was not Sauron. He was a politician who had too thin a skin, and the ragging from the media made him paranoid to the point of breaking the law. Nixon was trying to imitate JFK by playing hardball, but he never quite understood how it worked. If he had been having the affairs and receiving the drugs that Kennedy was, would it have been ignored by the media?

I never saw Watergate as the huge constitutional crisis that the media like to talk about. It was proof that no one is above the law and that you can't keep a conspiracy secret in a free country. The Clinton Impeachment showed what Democrats hadn't learned that lesson. Neither has CBS.