Time to retire "MSM"

kos for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday January 05, 2006 · 9:27 AM PST

2006/01/05 · 09:27

I've recently been on a crusade against the term "mainstream media" or MSM. The fact that it's a right-wing construct doesn't help. But the chief reason is that interactive media is now mainstream. In fact, there are tons of blogs and wikis and email lists that have larger readerships than most of the so-called "MSM". If Daily Kos was a newspaper, it would rank #5 in circulation (it would've been #3 last October, in the runup to the election). The top blogs have more readers than most cable news channel shows have viewers. And while their circulation numbers and ratings fall, our numbers continue to grow.

So really, why do we continue to self-marginalize by pretending we're not mainstream?

Furthermore, MSM has become a negative word. While that plays nicely into the Right's efforts to destroy objective journalism ("reality" is their enemy), we just want journalists to do their job better and report without undue influence from the conservative reality distortion machine.

That's why I call old-school media the "traditional media". It's political neutral, it has no negative connotations. It doesn't put old media on a pedestal, as though it was more "legitimate" than new interactive media. It doesn't imply that we are tiny niches while they speak to the mainstream and the masses.

It's time to proudly take our place in the mainstream. But to do that, we first need to stop implying that we're not with that stupid "MSM" monicker.

Time to retire "MSM"

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