XX-XX-XXXX
Stephanie Ramage, News Editor
The Sunday Paper
RE: Your Column on ‘Regulating The Internet’
Dear Ms. Ramage:
I read with keen interest your somewhat exasperated piece in The Sunday Paper headlined "Regulate The Internet", where you advocated more gatekeepers for cyberspace and patted your industry on the back while assigning it all manner of courage under fire, heroics and toughness that it doesn't deserve.
Beside the fact that I think you would feel much more at home in government work (dictating where people should get their information from, constricting rather than widening means of mass communication, possessed of rigid concepts about what's right and wrong for other human beings, countries, geographic regions, galaxies, etc., etc.), I have to admit I am still touched when your newspaper calls and pleads with me to renew my subscription for ever decreasing amounts of money. Sometimes, just to humor myself and give AJC the benefit of the doubt, I renew in the hopes that a random attack of courage and truth-telling has swept through newsrooms nationwide. But I am always bitterly disappointed, I must add.
Since the tone of your column suggests you truly don't have a clue about what has happened to the gathering and dissemination of useful information in the last 10 years, allow me to point out some of the many reasons you and many of the dwindling number of your newsroom colleagues are so hostile and resentful of the internet. I offer this as someone who worked for years in print journalism and who now -- along with millions of others -- gets his news and information from the internet.
· The internet offers UNFILTERED news. Good stories and exposes on government corruption don’t get killed before they reach the public, passing through layer upon layer of editors, each with his own agenda and his corporate master's prejudices breathing down his collective neck. Those shoestring internet operations and bloggers were calling this administration on its lies ramping up to war when you all were standing around with your hair on fire, insisting you couldn't see or smell any smoke.
· The internet operates without large central corporate control, sparing us the Pravda-like uniformity we see in the TV news networks and daily newspapers (LA Times, NY Times, AJC) where the lead stories are handed down by a very tightly knit and small clique of "deciders". An excellent early dissection of the gradual rollup of media ownership into a handful of multi-national corporations can be found at http://www.thenation.com/archive/detail/9609177535.
· For many, many years now the mainstream news outlets have been little more than cheerleaders for the federal government, as well as unskeptical, uncritical regurgitators of whatever comes out of the White House press secretary's mouth (including LIES that stampeded the nation and congress to an illegal war in the Mideast. Cf. recent confessions of Scott McClelland about Plame-gate for more insight!). I understand your loyalty to strong central government but I can get the same information you routinely peddle from a thousand dot-gov websites.
· The mainstream media has developed a disturbing practice of devouring its own, as witnessed by the case of former Fox News reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, who lost their jobs and a legal appeal for no other reason than they told the truth. Visit http://foxbghsuit.com for the lowdown. Theirs is the kind of courage your industry relinquished years ago, which explains why they are no longer at Fox or CNNABCCBSNBC (take your pick).
Yes, I know there is a lot of crap out there on the internet, things that stretch credulity and insult our intelligence. You seem to suggest that picking up a fresh copy of USA Today, NYT or AJC edition will somehow enlighten and shield us from falsehood, but you should take a closer look at your own information house of cards (Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Judith Miller, Theresa Rice on and on and on).
The mainstream media through a long slow march to centralized ownership has surrendered its role as the fourth estate to instead become the fourth branch of government (and a vividly useless branch of government at that).
The same internet news services you and your colleagues look down on sneeringly can get credentialled and hit federal officials with tough questions at press conferences too. The difference is those internet news agencies will PUBLISH what those officials said, then follow up and check on those officials' claims for accuracy, and even – miracle of miracles! -- expose those claims as lies if need be (and the need gets greater and greater with each passing hour).
Also, I wouldn't be too quick to throw stones at various glass houses. Mainstream news services have now taken to monitoring the internet for breaking news stories, then STEALING those leads without so much as a by-your-leave to the actual reporters who did the work you and your industry have so markedly failed to do in recent years (check I Am Facing Foreclosure for a recent example).
Anyway, cheer up, there are growing opportunities for truth seekers in cyberspace as the mainstream newsrooms accelerate layoffs and descend into triviality ('Potter Author Reveals Dumbledore Is Gay!' 'Brittany Spears' Sister, 16, Pregnant!'), while the lies gushing out of Washington DC go ignored, unchallenged and unvetted by you and your colleagues.
Sincerely,
P.S. Since you bring up the spectre of lax domain name registration, why don’t you track down some of those “al-qaeda recruiting websites” the government was waving at us awhile back, until it was revealed the sites could all be traced to servers located in Texas and Virginia?
