What The Blogsphere Does

I've never been convinced by claims that the blogsphere is ready to overtake old media. After all, even taking the most optimistic claims at face value, it's not as if TV ever killed off radio is it ? Nope, they do different jobs, and now the blogsphere does a whole new one.

Take this post by Laban Tall. He's dead right about a news blackout. Big Media, the supposedly wild & wacky Fourth Estate, has thrown its hand in with Big Government. Sure, they'll complain about stuff that's off the L3 blacklist - Iraq above all else. But when it comes to the central tenets of L3 faith, the media will down the Kool Aid in one.

But now Laban Tall has told us all about it. Under normal circumstances, there's no way I'd know there were riots in Peterborough but the blogsphere has changed everything. Now the public can talk to each other without Big Media acting as a filter. Sure, these are early days, but looking over at America you can see how the Blogsphere makes it much harder for the Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle Dummer of Big Government and Big Media to spin the news. No, the blogsphere isn't a political force in itslef - otherwise Howard Dean would be the Democrat nominee - but it's making it harder than ever for the Metropolitan elite to set the agenda. Nowadays, no one in the media wants to be Woodward or Bernstein, but it turns out that the Blogsphere is one big Deep Throat [and you can keep your jokes to yourself].