It's a lot of work producing news in a market where the customers can fact-check you and publicly question or even discredit you, and do so on your dime.
Mass Media's not like that. Mass media's top-down, in-out, we talk-you listen.
Mass media doesn't have the time to worry about what everybody wants to know about. So it doesn't. So you don't get your answers. In fact, the very idea that you are entitled to ask questions never even occurs to mass media.
That's why mass media is so easily corrupted into a tool of tyrants.
And why mass media, all of it, is so threatened by the rise of the netroots, and the rise of blogging networks such as Dailykos most of all.
What We've Got Goin' On
Consider this:
1. We've got field correspondents (GIs in the field, returning soldiers, aid workers, peace workers) in places FoxNews doesn't even pretend to have access to anymore.
2. We've got a bullpen of subject matter experts and cross-disciplinary analysts that can put the Top 50 universities on the planet to shame...and they're always available, and nobody whines (much) about not having tenure.
3. We occasionally get snookered, but we catch it ourselves, and we repudiate errors in coverage or analysis and we make it right. The mass media doesn't do that.
5. In fact, quite often it is the participatory media (that's us) who have to expose the mass media's sloth, oversight, partiality, and sometimes outright complicity in the presentation, replication and amplification of willfully ignorant and false information.
6. The media cannot even begin to operate at our level of coverage and competence sufficiently to compete on the facts. And customers of news and news-as-entertainment are starting to take notice.
7. Someone else is, too: the powers that be. For we not only cover the headlines and the human interest stories (yeah, we do missing white girls, too, insofar as that's news), we offer up a newstand's worth of fresh copy, from camp comedy to stunning scientific analysis, each and every day.
8. And we evolve; our schtick is not brand...looking and feeling and being a certain image. Eff that. We're about dialogue and conversation and transformation, a partnership between producers of news and consumers of news.
9. And that's something that mass media doesn't have, cannot buy, and is never going to offer...because mass media is about influence, domination and control.
10. We are about influence, liberation and empowerment.
11. People like that. So their eyes and their time and their thoughts come here.
12. And so, in time, will the smart advertising dollars.
As for those who wonder: What good have we done yet?
Three words: Strong Competitive Primaries.
We just had a visit from Representative Jane Harman, who once felt so selfsure in her tailor-made district that she could declare herself to be 'the best Republican in the Democratic Party'.
Oh, I'm sure that was funny when it was said...just not to Democrats in her district.
One in particular was a Kossack. Let's call her...Marcy Winograd, to protect her anonymity. :)
Marcy was impressed that other Kossacks were taking up the challenge of challenging weak incumbents, not always Republicans, and decided that perhaps it was Jane Harman's turn to have a taste of the future...a future that we are creating, one strong competitive primary at a time.
How Dare Those Angry Bloggers Get Involved!!!
There are people who don't like us very much, nor what we do, and they are also Democrats. They say that promoting progressive challenges to existing Dem incumbents generates such vicious infighting, that it weakens our chances to take back Congress.
Two words: Westly. Angelides. NOT Kossacks. NOT progressive, at least not as this poster thinks of it. NOT Netroots...though Westly has some Ebay stock, so I guess that makes everything okay.
Our candidates of choice are on the up-and-up, with great campaigns that neither need dirt nor fear to kick up some dust when the other team starts talking trash. Laesch, Tester, Lamont and, of course, Winograd.
Nothing will strengthen our bid to resume control of Capitol Hill, and fortify it for decades to come, better than having the strongest Democrats running for office, every time. Now maybe that strong Democrat is loaded to the gills with coin. Maybe he's a schoolteacher with a whole lot of online friends. Maybe she's just mad as hell at unrepresentative Representatives, and she's not going to take it anymore.
So, toss 'em in a strong competitive primary together, and see the cream rise to the top.
What This Gets Incumbents -- Gone, If They're Lame and Got No Flavor
Hey, if you're an incumbent, you need to be in the habit of doing battle with a fanatical, well-organized and unscrupulous opposition with limitless funding. If you can't weather a challenge from, well, a blogger who decided one day to run for Congress, perhaps you need to go back to running for state or local office, and let the rookie have her shot in The Show.
Say it with me
Strong competitive primaries, my friends. We, we here at Dailykos and elsewhere in the netroots, are making this happen. And there is not one Democrat, not even the incumbent Dem who survives a tough challenge from a net-backed challenger, who will not profit from the experience...so long as he or she respects the new way that the strongest power in politics, the will of the people, is asserting itself.
And we, my fellow Kossacks, are the orange banner-waving vanguard of something that is truly special and honorable and important: Restoring democracy, whether establishment Democrats like it or not. Whether high-handed Republicans like it or not. Whether a runaway President likes it or not.
Foxies taking pot shots at you? Bah. Take a bow. Take a moment to smile and wave back at the blustering red, white and balloon-heads.
Better still: Take a victory lap. After all, it's yours.