The Black Republican

The Economist has an insightful look into the death of the network news and the rise of the blogosphere with Dropping the Anchorman. Here's one place where they seem to see the deeper story, and don't just deliver platitudes to the emergence of New Media.

For most of the post-war era the American media were dominated by a comfortable liberal consensus. The New York Times was the undisputed king of the print news, while the network anchors lorded it over TV news. That consensus is now under siege. The attacks are partly coming from the cable networks?particularly from conservative Fox News. (Charles Krauthammer once quipped that Rupert Murdoch had spotted a niche market?half the country. Sure enough, Fox is now America's top-rated cable news network.) But old media also face a newer and more unpredictable source of competition?the blogosphere. Bloggers have discovered that all you need to set yourself up as a pundit is a website and an attitude.

Damn straight.

The erosion of the old media establishment probably does entail some shift to the right, if only because so many of the newer voices are more reliably pro-Republican than Mr Rather. But the new media are simply too anarchic and subversive for any single political faction to take control of them. There are plenty of leftish bloggers too: such people helped Howard Dean's presidential campaign. And the most successful conservative bloggers are far from being party loyalists: look at the way in 2002 that they kept the heat on the Republicans' then Senate leader, Trent Lott, for racist remarks that the New York Times originally buried.

Damn straight II.

Amazingly, amid all this great analysis of how the blogosphere is strategically affecting the news, there's still just a little bit of that Old Media condescension - or is it an admission of guilty indulgence? - about tactics.

It is a safe bet that, if the current Bush administration goes the way of previous second-term administrations and becomes consumed by scandals, conservative bloggers will be in the forefront of the scandal-mongering.

Naturally, those of us looking at it from this side of the lens wouldn't call it "scandal-mongering". We like to think of it as "truth-telling".

There is a nice recovery in the end to resume the bow toward New Media, which (I agree) despite a rightward tilt is more an institutional change than an ideological one.

Mr Rather's passing does not mean that the liberal orthodoxy is about to give way to a new conservative one. It means that all orthodoxies are being chewed up by a voraciously unpredictable news media, which is surely all to the good.

The American coronation of the Fourth Estate as the embodiment of the other three Estates is over, and bloggers are more than eager to play their part and say, "Off with their heads!", and "Long Live the Revolution!". I wonder where those metaphors will end. Hopefully some time before a Napoleon crowns himself.