What makes the mainstream media so valuable, even if they're full of crap, or influenced by government or big business, or hippy dippy liberal elites, what makes them superior to the small private source is that the MSM is public. It is the unrehearsed soundtrack of this incredible movie we call history. It goes on record, it is shared, it opens itself to contradiction, it is archived, and it competes with others like itself for the public trust. It is read by everyone, and if it is outed everyone knows it and the purveyors of the lie are discredited. That's what you don't get on the net.

As gbaikie points out, you are dead wrong on this.

The internet is far more "public" than the conventional media, with a potential range across the entire planet. How many people does a print newspaper hit? How many newspapers had even a national American audience before the internet? How many network news programs are broadcast routinely internationally?

It goes on record much more thoroughly than the conventional media. In the old days, when I wanted to find back articles in a newspaper, I had two choices: Hope the library had microfilm of it, or actually go to the newspaper offices themselves if they were in town. Good frigging luck trying to track down an old TV news story. Anywhere. Routine access to these things was costly, and usually only by other conventional media sources.

A controversial internet article or film is archived in many places, sometimes automatically, even if someone erases the original later. Ironically, the best way to find old newspaper articles or news films is on the Net, and equally ironically, unlike alternative media, sometimes you have to pay for them. Which is more "accessible" even now?

Even internet writers who desperately try to "erase" past writings--Michael Moore is famous for this--find that their work has been lovingly backed up in servers all over the world, and is available on many other sites.

The internet is much more open to effective criticism than the conventional media was, and has opened the conventional media to more effective criticism. Twenty years ago if someone who wasn't fortunate enough to own his own newspaper or TV station had some argument with something put out by a major newspaper, what recourse did you have? Write a letter to the editor, and hope they actually publish it? Is your local TV station going to let you rebut a story on the air?

Now an article is immediately open to argument by others with as much access to the general public as the media has. People on the Net are "outed" every day. Hell, every minute. If someone is full of crap on an important issue, there are ten other sites on top of it, usually within the same day. If you're lucky, in a newspaper, you get a "correction" a week later on page A21.

The media doesn't get to filter its own criticism any more. It's beginning to show.

I'm not surprised the old media is not happy about this. They used to run the place. Hell, they used to BE the place. Competition? Look sometimes at your local paper and see how many of the big news stories were just plucked from the Washington Post or the New York Times. How many stories were just taken from the newswire unedited? The media is a lot more monolithic than it seems.

We are MUCH better off now than we were years ago. Walter Cronkite used to be a god. Now some punk with a computer can go up against Dan Rather and make it stick.

Someone once said something like, "There's freedom of the press only if you happen to own a printing press." That's not true any more, and it's a good thing.