The Left's near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information - which long allowed liberal opinion makers to sweep aside ideas and beliefs they disagreed with, as if they were beneath argument - is skidding to a startlingly swift halt... Almost overnight, three huge changes in communications have injected conservative ideas right into the heart of that debate...
The first and most visible of these three seismic events: the advent of cable TV...
Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice - a "punk-rock-capitalist" entertainment corporation that publishes the hipster bible Vice magazine, produces CDs and films, runs clothing stores, and claims (plausibly) to have been "deep inside the heads of 18-30s for the past 10 years" - spots "a new trend of young people tired of being lied to for the sake of the 'greater good.'" ...
Polling data indicate that younger voters are indeed trending rightward - supporting the Iraq war by a wider majority than their elders, viewing school vouchers favorably, and accepting greater restrictions on abortion, such as parental-notification laws (though more accepting of homosexuality than older voters)...
...the rise of the Internet, the second explosive change shaking liberal media dominance. It's hard to overstate the impact that news and opinion websites like the Drudge Report, NewsMax, and Dow Jones's OpinionJournal are having on politics and culture, as re current-event "blogs" - individual or group web diaries - like AndrewSullivan, [GreatGuys,] InstaPundit, and "The Corner" department of NationalReviewOnline (NRO), where the editors and writers argue, joke around, and call attention to articles elsewhere on the web. This whole universe of web-based discussion has been dubbed the "blogosphere."
While there are several fine left-of-center sites, the blogosphere currently tilts right, albeit idiosyncratically, reflecting the hard-to-pigeonhole politics of some leading bloggers...
The third big change breaking the liberal media stranglehold is taking place in book publishing. Conservative authors long had trouble getting their books released, with only Regnery Books, the Free Press, and Basic Books regularly releasing conservative titles. But following editorial changes during the 1990s, Basic and the Free Press published far fewer conservative-leaning titles, leaving Regnery pretty much alone...
I think the blogosphere will end up being by far the most important. Of course that may be personal bias since I don't watch TV, but the problem with TV, radio, and books is that they all have a tendency to spin and lie whether they are left, center, or right. So does the blogosphere, but because there are so many sites, and because there is google, you can get a better idea of whether or not something is true and the different spins partly cancel each other out.
This shift in the control of information is critical and revolutionary. In a democracy such as ours, especially one where the populace is heavily armed, the only route to exploit power to one's advantage and tyranny is to control information. Those that have controlled the media have controlled the information and therefore our minds for at least the past century.
We are finally being freed from this control. Now that my eyes have personally been opened, I am outraged at how badly deceived I've been in the past and how gullible I apparently am. It's not that I think I know what's going on yet. It's more that I at least know now that I don't know what's going on. At least I now have the opportunity to learn and figure it out.
In my opinion, the Democrats and the Left are going to be the first casualties. Why? Because a whopping huge majority of journalists are Democrat (greater than 90%), and even with that information advantage, in the last century the Democrats have only had small majorities in Congress and the President has been a Democrat about half the time. It's no surprise to me that as these new channels of information have increased during the past 20 years, the Republicans are gaining ground.
Many Republican politicians are gloating. Well, they better enjoy it while they can because I think that politicians of all stripes are going to be the next casualties of this information control shift paradigm. Politicians' abilities to lie and deceive with impugnity are going out the window and the populace isn't going to put up with it much longer. They will lose part of their power simply because they will be unable to control the flow of information. I will speculate that they will further lose power because we will have the ability to reign them in. We will strip them of their power and prestige and turn them into civil servants. Truly a government by, of, and for the people.
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