HunterByrd

This election cycle has brought about a paradigm shift. We haven't even gotten to the actual election, yet, and something just as important has come to pass. The immense, overwhelmingly powerful, traditional 'Fourth Estate' has begun to crumble. In the past, it has been said that the liberal, mainstream media's heft has been worth at least 15 percentage points in the election. No doubt the MSM retains great sway, but not like before.

The 'MSM' can be distilled to the major print outlets and services of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Reuters, and UPI, together with the old-line TV News outlets ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. The 'new' media is talk radio, the blogosphere, and the Fox News Network. The 'new' media largely consists of conservative voices.

The seminal news event which has put this new dynamic into play has been The Swiftboat Veterans for Truth story. While the MSM tried to bury the story, the 'new' media hammered away at relentless speed. Fact checking. Opining. The story would not go away. Finally, the MSM was forced to address it. They did so by attacking Bush, by attacking the Swift Vets, while ignoring the many factual allegations of the story itself.

As one blogger commented, what if, when DNC Chairman Terry McCauliff's called on the media to investigate Bush's attendance in the Alabama Air National Guard, the MSM had gone after McAuliffe instead? The 'new' media was absolutely undeterred, and then the story metasticized into a critique of the MSM itself. Amazing the revolution.

Bloggers got downright smart with the old line media (the truth hurts):

Blogs from Instapundit to The Belmont Club to Powerline were reveling in the demise of the old media and heaping scorn upon professional journalists. "I have been both a lawyer/law professor for two decades and a television/radio/print journalist for 15 years of those 20," Hugh Hewitt blogged. "It takes a great deal more intelligence and discipline to be the former than to be the latter, which is why the former usually pays a lot more than the latter. It is no surprise to me, then, when lawyers/law professors like those at Powerline and Instapundit prove to be far more adept at exposing the 'Christmas-in-Cambodia' lie and other Kerry absurdities than old-school journalists."

John Hinderaker, one of the bloggers behind Powerline, summed up the mood of the blogosphere by comparing journalism with brain surgery: "A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field," he said. "But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can't? Nothing." See Jonathan Last's "The not-so swift mainstream media"

The bloggers drove the other components of the new media. Synergy was established, and with it, the struggle for the primacy of ideas was bumped up a couple of notches. None of this could have happened without the internet, and with it, the emergence of powerful search engines. Here is what the great commentator Mark Steyn observes (don't you love the man's incomparable gift for analogy?):

A few months back, I bought a DVD set of an old TV variety show, black and white but digitally remastered. A bit too digitally remastered, as it turned out. It would be ungallant to name the lady artiste in question, but in several alarming close-ups it's all too clear she's come back from lunch a little the worse for wear, and in one scene she looks as if she's just been woken up after sleeping in the park for a week.

Not her fault. The make-up guy was making her look good enough for 1960 monochrome UHF lines. He couldn't have foreseen that 40 years on they'd have big-screen satellite TVs and DVD players and technology that would make that little facial pimple look like Mount Krakatoa about to blow through your screen.

That's what happened to John Kerry. For 25 years, he told The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, the United States Senate, and all manner of other well-known saps about his covert Yuletide operations inside Cambodia gun-running to anti-communists with his lucky CIA hat. To verify any of this would have required a trip to specialist reference libraries, looking up stuff on eye-straining microfiche, etc. So it was easier to let the old blowhard yak away and just nod occasionally.

Senator Kerry couldn't have foreseen that Al Gore would invent the Internet, and there'd be this Google thingy, and all you'd have to do is tap in a few words and a nanosecond later it would all be at your fingertips – veterans memoirs, Cambodian history, declassified Johnson administration documents, previous Kerry "stretchers" (as Mark Twain called them).

The Kerry campaign has now conceded that, by his own contemporaneous account, the young lieutenant was nowhere near Cambodia in Christmas 1968 and, if he was ever on a covert gun-running operation across the border during his four months in Vietnam, he seems to be the only rookie Swift boat lieutenant to land in the territory and get entrusted with such a mission, and it was evidently so top secret that neither his commanding officers nor the men on his own boat knew a thing about it. [excerpted from John Kerry's real 'band of brothers' in The Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1093402928027&apage=1]

Yes, the MSM continues to fight off this (once) stealthy stab at its supremacy, but it has lost ground. One thing is for certain: its foe is yet an infant. The 'new' media has just arrived. It is not going to leave. It is only going to get better.