Daily Kos: I’ve recently been on a crusade against the term “mainstream media” or MSM. The fact that it’s a right-wing construct doesn’t help. But the chief reason is that interactive media is now mainstream. In fact, there are tons of blogs and wikis and email lists that have larger readerships than most of the so-called “MSM”. If Daily Kos was a newspaper, it would rank #5 in circulation (it would’ve been #3 last October, in the runup to the election). The top blogs have more readers than most cable news channel shows have viewers. And while their circulation numbers and ratings fall, our numbers continue to grow.
So really, why do we continue to self-marginalize by pretending we’re not mainstream?
That’s why I call old-school media the “traditional media”. It’s political neutral, it has no negative connotations. It doesn’t put old media on a pedestal, as though it was more “legitimate” than new interactive media. It doesn’t imply that we are tiny niches while they speak to the mainstream and the masses.
[via Blog Herald]
