You can see this as evidence of dysfunctional, or perhaps non functional, media. Or you can see it for what it is - which is another example of democratic deficit.
Blogs are noisy people-driven media. Professional media aren't noisy. They're not just Serious™ - which is a good antonym for noisy and tainted by messy emotion - but they're also relentlessly on-message.
In media-speak blogs are many-to-many, the MSM is one-to-many. The one-to-many model, where a single source coherently repeats and promotes opinions, is inherently undemocratic.
The real point of media isn't to get people listening to politicians, lobbyists and experts, it's to get politicians, lobbyists and experts listening to and talking back to people.
On that criterion, all of the MSM get a fail - because the real job of the MSM, as and when debate appears to happen, is to reflect and shape the opinions of policy makers. The strict monopoly on strategy held by these people excludes anyone who isn't already on the inside.
In the context of the meltdown, it's useful to remember that the crash was visible ahead of time to almost everyone who wasn't a media or political leader.
So the best you'll get from the MSM is manufactured scandals like the MP and MEP expenses story - which appear populist, but in fact are perfectly timed to herd the electorate like sheep in a useful direction.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
This is a crucial distinctions between modes of communication, telephony and its engineering in particular.
Whether or not one wants to characterize a broadcaster "undemocratic" is a trivial matter in consideration of structural barriers which physically prevent "everyman" competing with MSM publishers to broadcast messages to a finite audience.
That is send/receive capacity (a/k/a mbps) assigned by subscriber class (data/voice/video, commercial/personal) by ICT-type (fiber/copper/satellite/radio) of carrier or operator. Isn't it odd, one can always receive twice as much as one can send?
The net-neutrality crew tends to promote the bane of content censorship over property exclusions. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
