The Old Media Will Be Replaced by the New Gatekeepers of Information

Small Dead Animals has a post up about how people are starting to grasp how the internet is changing how media is both created and consumed – specifically newsmedia.

While it is true that blogging and other types of electronic dissemination are changing how people get informed, turning the news into something interactive and globalized, but also grouped into special interests, it occurs to me that this will not solve the problem of the overwhelming leftist bias in the news.

This isn’t because reporters will remain leftist. Reporters are becoming irrelevant as everyone gains the ability to “create” news. The broader spectrum of information sources will remain.

It is because the “Mainstream Media” will change form. What we think of now as the monopolists of media, the Ted Turners, the CBC’s, the AOL Time-Warners, the Bell Globemedias, the New York Times, the Toronto Stars, will fall by the wayside. This is inevitable.

What will rise in their stead will be the gatekeepers of information. Those gatekeepers will control what information we are allowed to know, and who we are allowed to know it from. They may or may not create content themselves, but they will permit or deny access to the already created content that they do not wish to have us know.

It occurs to me as I wrote the above, that this sounds very paranoid – even Orwellian. Sorry for the phraseology, but this is already in play. Take a look at how Google behaves. It is already well known and documented that a Chinese citizen utilizing Google within Mainland China will not be permitted to view results for terms like “democracy”. Google is complicit in the censorship of information conducted by the Communist government of China. How many deals will Google strike with governments to permit or deny access to information by citizens? How long will it be before the Canadian Human Rights Commissions find against Google for permitting “hate” speech to be read in searches performed on their systems, since it is obviously within their control to prevent access to it?

It is also borne out in Google’s news aggregators. Now, this one is a little harder to prove as it is based on my personal experience, but having used their aggregator for at least 3 years, I have observed during the last federal election and after, Google News listing press releases from www.liberal.ca as “news”, alongside content from well known liberal message board www.rabble.ca and extremely leftist newspapers like the Georgia Straight. To date, I have never seen content aggregated at Google News from well known right wing news sources like www.lifesitenews.com or www.worldnetdaily.com. You can guess, and you would be correct that they never aggregate press releases from www.conservative.ca.

Just because blogs are winning the battle for information now, friends, doesn’t mean that we will win the war. We need to start standing up for freedom of expression, freedom to communicate, and the freedom of the internet for all.