A revolutionary decade: Google killed the Media Stars
Posted by Bill Dupray
on Dec 28 2009 Filed under Politics.
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On August 1, 1981 MTV was born and the first video was Video killed the Radio Star, by the Buggles. It was a fitting tribute to the evolution of technology, wherein dinosaurs who could not adapt were left behind.
Maybe we can bring the Buggles back to sing an ode the 2000′s, the aughts, or whatever unsatisfying name you prefer for this past decade. We could call the song Google Killed the Media Stars.
While those in the MSM are the ones (predictably) lamenting their relegation to buggy-whip status, the rest of us have immensely enjoyed the evolution and democratization of the media. It is all about (to borrow a phrase) choice and competition.
For decades, the MSM enjoyed a monopoly on news. If they thought it was important, you were told about it (“All the news that’s fit to print”).
More importantly for our purposes though is the fact that while you may have been told the news, you were not necessarily told the truth. Big difference. After all, I can tell you a guy tried to blow up a plane in Detroit. That is news. But I can also tell you the guy was a Muslim jihadist on a terror watch list, who was not stopped by Homeland Security and the only thing that saved the government’s sorry ass was a faulty detonator. That is the truth.
So it really is pretty simple. If you want the truth, you go to the people and sites that give it to you. Those who tell the truth to more people will have a larger audience and will succeed.
Howard Kurtz has a piece out today that shows just how far we have come (and how far the MSM has fallen) in the past 10 years.
On Jan. 1, 2000, there was no Huffington Post or Daily Kos or National Review Online or Politico or Facebook or Twitter. There were a relative handful of bloggers — I joined their ranks that summer — but nothing like the tens of millions who permeate cyberspace today. If you had a BlackBerry, it was a two-way pager. The iPhone was but a glimmer in Steve Jobs’s eye. The only mass medium for downloading music was six-month-old Napster. The fledgling Google was covered mainly by tech writers.
No piece on the decline of the legacy media would be complete without a partial list of the dead and dying dinosaurs.
As fate would have it, all this has coincided with the collapse of the business model that sustained mainstream outfits for generations. The digital revolution has killed off several newspapers and sent those in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore into bankruptcy; the Washington Times, which is cutting nearly half its staff, has just ended its weekend print run. Plummeting revenue has killed off numerous magazines — Portfolio, Gourmet and Vibe among the latest victims. And when Comcast struck a deal to buy NBC Universal, the television network itself was treated like scrap metal.
So as we go forward into the next decade, enjoy your freedom to choose the truth in your news sources, while we enjoy our freedom to bring you the truth and to dance on the graves of those whose lies and failed business models finally caught up with them.
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