The founders of Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, have admitted that we, the hoi-polloi, now have more effect on the news than the mainstream media:
The establishment media face tremendous pressure to remain the preeminent voice in shaping culture and politics, Axios chiefs Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen said Friday.
VandeHei and Allen acknowledged citizen journalists on social media platforms have more power than ever to break through the establishment media complex and report what they see and hear.
It’s just so amusing to see this admission by two guys with “juice” in the industry at the same time they and Democrats, admit that Biden was “non compos mentis” since Day One of his Presidency (and this latter fact is grist for yet another post.
I would have to say that this move towards us and away from MSM started with “RatherGate (“Fake but accurate” where I remember Dan Rather, “head dude” of the MSM at the time, tried to cover up docs that pointed out that there had been a cover up on Bush II getting into the Texas Air National Guard)(emphasis mine):
The Killian documents controversy (also referred to as Memogate or Rathergate[1][2]) involved six documents containing false allegations about President George W. Bush‘s service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73, allegedly typed in 1973. Dan Rather presented four of these documents[3] as authentic in a 60 Minutes II broadcast aired by CBS on September 8, 2004, less than two months before the 2004 presidential election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate them.[4][5][6] Several typewriter and typography experts soon concluded that they were forgeries.[7][8] Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett provided the documents to CBS, but he claims to have burned the originals after faxing them copies.[9]
The big deal is that the docs had proportional fonts when typewriters (yes, I used one in high school and in college) did not have that capability and that TANG docs were fixed font-based like most typewriters.
Yet, the MSM tried their hardest to tie the forgeries as being truthful to dirty up Bush. And it was the nascent “Blogosphere” that found the font info, the coverups, publicized it all, and made the MSM cry uncle. Why?
It was Dan Rather who got hoisted by his own petard, lost his reputation, lost his job, and the supporting MSM started its long fall in lost credibility. Subsequent hoaxes by the MSM haven’t helped:
The MSM is no longer able to “frame” the news anymore – too often, they have forgotten the 5th-grade basics of “Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How” in simply reporting the news and not their opinions (or mixing the two together). Sure, GraniteGrok, while mostly writing from a conservatarian OPINIONATED viewpoint (and we make it VERY clear that’s who we are – Constitutionally based and with Conservatarian), we do cover events and “just the reporting, ma’am) and exclude opinion (like with over 4000 YouTube videos that cover many of the NH political events we’ve covered).
Many others, just like us, have done the same thing – a counterweight to the MSM that has only tipped more and more, we can stand on what we’ve done.
I’ll end with this (emphasis mine):
VandeHei and Allen, media elites who appear to earn a living from framing the news with a left-wing bias, admitted that political fights, such as the recent spending battle, are won by “those who control the flow of information to the largest numbers of people — or the right people at the right moment on the right topic.”
Citizen journalists, VandeHei and Allen admitted, are winning control of the flow of information.
Journalists – “they is us!” as we, the citizenry, can be in more places and faster, than those of the MSM persuasion. And, to top it off, have FAR more expertise in a lot of the areas in which they try to write about.
Like with typewriters.
Credence, Capability, Capacity, and Credibility.
