[Cross posted at
Bopnews.com]
Air America and XM form a long term deal. And it shows how the dams that have kept the mainstream pent up are falling. [Also in the LA Times.]
Everyone has their favorite peeves - mine is the phrase "mainstream media". The mainstream is defined by where the country is going, and where people are. By this measure the mainstream has been flowing away from Mt. Bushmore for a while.
When the National Press Club invites Gannon as if he were a journalist, you know that the "press" as defined by the old line media is not mainstream. At least, I don't think that Gannon's career path is mainstream particularly, The Shiavo case is another example: the cable news shows were all for it, but the country was definitely against it.
The truth is that the mainstream is where the fish are swimming, and any fish on fox is a fish out of water.
This is why the use of the term "mainstream" to refer to the top down media is a bad idea. The employee of a large corporation may be upstream, but whether it is water or sewage depends on what is coming out of the pipe, not the amount of money that it cost to buy the pipe. as this Pew report shows the mainstream is the people searching for information, and everyone, from the mightiest of corporate outlets to the smallest of bloggers, is carried along by the tide of that stream.
Looking at the demographics - 50% of college graduates and 36% of people from 18 to 49 go online for news at least three times a week, and 82% of 18 to 29 year olds are on the internet regularly. Getting news online now equals in frequency reading a magazine. That's as mainstream as it gets.
What is essential is not to attack the mainstream - because we'd be flailing around in the water - it is to break the dams to information. Even Jack Shafer, a habitual user of the phrase "mainstream" admits that online commentary is as good, and more timely, than the commentary in the older mediums. These dams have packaged information in ways that are misleading - such as the "Osama bin Saddam" references that peppered the media in the run up to Iraq. It almost seemed that it was in the manual of style at major dailies to make sure that a sentence that had one, had the other. It has been the packaging of economic data which paints an excessively rosy picture of the economy. It has been the failure to critically look at the numbers presented by the Republicans - remember Krugman was barred from using the word "lie" in the 2000 campaign, even when there was no other word to describe what he found when looking at Bush's campaign promises.
Attacking "the mainstream" is a losing strategy in the end because, let's be realistic, if we want to live in a better society, it will be because the mainstream of America embraces the idea that a better America is a progressive America.
This is why Air America is a model. Note the name: America. The radio America is looking for, just as blogs are offering people the news and commentary they are looking for, and can't find other places. The mainstream is turning to them, and us, because we are coming to represent the cutting edge of American values and aspirations - in the same way that "independent" cinema grew in importance, because independent film makers make films about people, and not about people running from explosions.
The right wing is attacking "the mainstream media" for the simple reason, in their own little phrase, they want to release things "outside the filter". It is time we stopped doing so, but, instead, made the case that if you want to find the mainstream, wade on in.
The water's fine.