I put Middle Earth Journal in hiatus in May of 2008 and moved to Newshoggers.
I temporarily reopened Middle Earth Journal when Newshoggers shut it's doors but I was invited to Participate at The Moderate Voice so Middle Earth Journal is once again in hiatus.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

On uncensored thought, the media VS the blogs

Uncensored thought is frequently full of inaccuracies, lies and misleading statements. But wait, that's what we are getting from the censored thought in the Main Stream Media. In his commentary Blogs or Blotto?, Butler Shaffer looks at blogs and the media. His major point is that the blogs are threatening the corporate medias ability to tell us what to think. You really should read the entire piece but I'll give you a few snips.
...CNN hostess Judy Woodruff pondered, would people not be better advised to rely on the "mainstream media" for their news? She might just as well have added: "you have been content to let us do your thinking for you; why do you want to undertake such tedious and unceasing work? Let us continue to tell you what we think you should know!"
The media as a dinosaur?
The image that comes to mind when I think of the present institutional order, is that of the stegosaurus, the bell-curve-shaped dinosaur with plated armor along its spine. The stegosaurus was so large that it had two brains, one in its head the other in its tail. It is said that a stegosaurus might have been fatally attacked at its backside, while the frontal brain – due to the sluggish nature of the animal’s nervous system – might have continued munching tree leaves, not knowing that its fate was already sealed.
Blogs are not perfect, not the ones on the left, not the ones in the center and not the ones on the right. We saw a media that presented one side of the Iraq WMD issue, the side that turned out to be completely wrong. The media is no longer made up of journalists who investigate but talking heads who read propaganda. The real threat the corporate media sees in the blogs is the loss of the ability to control thought. This is not unprecedented:
Gutenberg put the establishment on the defensive centuries ago, demonstrating the creative consequences that flow from a loosening of monopolies on information. The Internet – with its proliferation of websites and bloggers, and the continuing collapse of the vertical into the horizontal – has taken the Gutenberg revolution to exponential dimensions.
Go read the entire piece, you will be glad you did.
Update
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