Stunner: American Public Tuning Out Mainstream Media as Reliably Liberal and Liberally Unreliable

Seems more and more folks are getting their news from something called the "Internet":

Even though Piasecki is firmly committed to voting for President Bush, he doesn't rely on the large conservative news organisations. Referring to the openly right-wing cable news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch, he says: "I'm a Fox kind of guy, but if I want to find out about the reality of what our forces are experiencing in the war in Iraq, or the huge wealth that John Kerry and his family have, I look for it on the internet."

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Travelling through the heartlands of the United States, one comes across many Americans like Piasecki and Cheramie, who rely on websites not just to find opinions that match their own, but also to uncover facts they believe bolster those views. It is a trend that reflects a deeply divided US electorate coming to the end of a bitterly contested presidential campaign.

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Also present, however, was a new media class: the bloggers. These individuals are part-diarists, part-polemicists, who publish their journals and accounts of the election campaign directly on the internet. If nothing else, the 2004 presidential election campaign will be noted as probably the first Western election where bloggers joined the ranks of journalists courted by the main candidates and parties, and were given similar kinds of privileges to travel with candidates and be afforded the same level of access at conferences and rallies.

Errrr... Um....

Alas, overstating it a bit. At least from my point of view.

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[T]he first and most important challenge that the mainstream US media faces is getting it right this election, one that many predict will be just as closely run as its predecessor. Whether it succeeds or not could determine just how many people decide to consult the mainstream media on defining national issues in the future.

I should note this is from the BBC. And, oddly enough, the writer finds that the reason more Americans are tuning out from the MSM is because it's apparently too darn pro-Iraq-War:

The second factor is a slowly growing unease within America about the current situation in Iraq. Here again, one detects a sense that many Americans are beginning to doubt what they are getting from much of the mainstream press. News organisations themselves have admitted to failures. The New York Times was one of the first to declare that it had failed to be robust enough in its coverage of the build-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Ummm... okay.

But, you know, the BBC isn't pathologically pacifist or anything. I mean, millions of Americans are just tuning out the MSM over their arrogant and self-satisfied liberal condescension, but that isn't a simple enoug answer for the BBC.

No, they dig deeper, to find the reason for the rise of the alternative media is a growing displeasure with American warmongering.

What can you say? They invented the "rueful chuckle" for a reason, and this, I think, is one of them.

Thanks to Alarming News, who also links a cool little feature, a little search engine to find your local polling place.

posted by Ace at 03:32 AM

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