An interesting discussion has developed in the General forum -
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3338852The premise is how DU was at the forefront to get the media to refer to Guckert as either "Jeff Gannon" (in quotations) or use his real (but extremely difficut to pronounce/remember) real name, James D. Guckert.
DU should again take the point and shift the popular term used to describe popular media from main stream to.....
I posed:
1. CORPORATE media reminds the reader who owns and controls it.
2. Blogs, newsgroups like indymedia & rawstory, and alternative radio are becoming part of the main stream.
Az added:
The news is not entirely controlled by the Corporations in the way we seem to want to believe. It is Corporations and their ways that have rendered the media useless as a news outlet. But its not a deliberate conspiracy that has brought it about.
It is simple corporate profit taking that has done the damage. Instead of investing in the news as a tool benefitting the public they have approached it as a money making part of their infrastructure. This means they do not look to it to perform as a stong news gathering institution. It merely has to appear to be a news gathering institution.
For this reason they have cut back on the capabilities and infrastructure. All that is left is a shell. A shell that merely reports what is handed to it. This has meant that the news cannot stand up to manipulation at the hands of the right.
Forced to rely on the information and spin provided by speakers that come from think tanks and other politically backed groups. These voices and their spin are not investigated. There simply isn't any ability left within the news community to do so.
Thus without deliberately doing so the Corporations have turned the news media into an infotainment branch of the right. Because the right was ready and in part responsible for this conversion they were there to take advantage of it. The left relied on the flow of objective information the media once provided. With that gone the left simply does not know how to move their agenda.
So which shall it be?