Saw Good Night and Good Luck recently. Liked it a lot in that kind of everything is different, everything is the same kind of way. One of the big differences that the movie reminded me of was that when there were fewer media outlets, each one had huge power. What these outlets said really mattered. People still talk about how much affect Cronkite had on the Vietnam war, but in 6 months maybe no one will even remember Aaron Brown.
While the impact of (printed) newspapers is continually declining, we now have more television channels that you can shake a remote at and a seemingly infinite array of perspectives on the web. What I have been wondering though is whether or not more is really much of an improvement. Having a diversity of views seems better than having 1 state run media outlet control the story. But as the number of media outlets (radio, TV, Weblog, etc) grow and grow the individual voices tend to become more and more entwined with some specific ideology that they are trying to sell. That’s not really progress, that’s just Pravda. Sure you get to choose the ideology you want coloring your news, unless your ideology is truth. As with all things in America, we get what we pay for and the news people want to buy is the news that agrees with what they think.
I’m not saying we should have only 1 (or 3) national media outlets, but if we did then at least what they said would matter. People might actually care about it and talk about it. Instead we have a group of people who listen to crap like Rush and another group listening to crap like Air America who don’t talk to each other. Each group feels like the stuff that the other listens to is biased propaganda that’s destroying the country. And they are both right.