There's that danged Fred agin

Fred is a writer/journalist and a brutally honest
one here.

Don't that beat all.

I can't argue with a word, but I'm sure Billy Moyers
would try his damnedest.

The media can’t change. They are too close to
being part of the government they purport to
cover, too steeped in the artificial
egalitarianism of the newsroom, too afraid of
each other, of advertisers, of being racist or
sexist, too big and smug and ossified. They
cannot report anything that might disturb blacks,
women, homosexuals, Jews, Latinos, or mental
defectives. Although the rosy-fingered dawn may
now be penetrating the hitherto intractable
darkness, too many journalists live in the past.
Like IBM when it thought that the personal
computer was a funny little typewriter, they
stare into the tiger’s maw and think that it’s a
closet. They would probably invest in slide rules.

How are these hobbled organs going to compete
with the wild west of the web, with its limitless
well-argued sites espousing or denouncing every
imaginable point of view? Compete with people who
document things that the majors can’t even talk
about? A conceit of the usual media is that the
web consists of inaccurate vanity sites run by
teenage bloggers in garages. These exist. So do
very researched sites by people who know their
fields and are not afraid to talk about them. The
difference is stark. The intelligent know it.

The whole serving.