Arianna: MSM has ADD, Bloggers Have OCD

Arianna Huffington recently appeared as a featured speaker at the Chautauqua Institution, a truly amazing piece of enlightened American history located in western New York that for well over a century has been a highly influential artistic, cultural, civic, and educational resource for people from all walks of life -- so much so that the name of the original venue became a definitive term for an entire national movement. Reporter Erica Erwin of The Erie Times-News had this to say about Ms. Huffington's remarks at the original Chautauqua this week:

CHAUTAUQUA, N.Y. -- In the 1950s, Edward R. Murrow revolutionized the news.

Today, bloggers are changing the way we read and receive the news -- but that doesn't mean traditional media outlets like television or newspapers are dying.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor of HuffingtonPost.com, one of the most linked-to and cited blogs on the Internet, delivered that message to the nearly 3,000 people who gathered to hear her speak at the Chautauqua Institution on Wednesday.

"The whole debate over print or Web, print or TV, it's really obsolete," Huffington said. "It's going to be a hybrid future."

Huffington's 30-minute speech, "Edward R. Murrow Would Be a Blogger: How the Internet Revolution is Changing News, Politics, and the Way We See the World," was part of the institution's weeklong examination of the news.

While Huffington wasn't ready to write the obituary of traditional media outlets, she wasn't willing to dole out much praise, either.

The mainstream media suffers from attention deficit disorder, Huffington said. Newspapers and other mainstream outlets find a story, "cover it obsessively," and then drop it, she said.

The blogosphere, on the other hand, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, she said.

Bloggers find a story and stay with it, often breaking news before their mainstream counterparts, Huffington said.

The story of Trent Lott making what some considered to be racist remarks at then-Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party in 2002 was broken by a blogger, she said, and Lott was forced to resign.

"That's the power of the blogosphere," she said.

Mainstream news outlets can't distinguish an important story from a "titillating" story, Huffington said, citing the round-the-clock coverage of Paris Hilton and other "celebrities."

{snip}

While acknowledging that bloggers need to do a better job when it comes to accuracy and fairness, Huffington said it was the mainstream media, not the online community, that "let the country down" during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

"The media became stenographers to power, to a very large extent," she said, again drawing applause.

More people are turning to blogs for their news because of increasing skepticism and discontentment with traditional outlets, she said.

Huffington also criticized traditional coverage of the presidential election.

"Campaign coverage is on a bus, on a plane, it's who's up, who's down, what the latest poll numbers say," she said. "It's not elucidating enough about who the candidates are."

{snip}

Arianna makes some great points in here.

But when it comes to Repiglickin' scandals, they seem to have amnesia most of the time.

because they failed to notice how many times everybody's stories changed, from Tripp to Flowers to Willey to Broaddrick and so on and so forth ad nauseum.

Had their attention not been so scattered and their concentration improved, they might have commented on some of it.

...though only by subscription. A 15-day free trial membership is available, though. And all the presentations there are at least interesting, often fascinating, and sometimes downright historical. Here's the link for this week's speech by Arianna Huffington:

http://www.thegreatlecturelibrary.com/index.php?select=speaker&data=997