media

Chris Knight's avatar

Continuing my commitment to write a new op-ed piece each week of 2025 (or aspiring to anyway), news and commentary website American Thinker – a site I can’t recommend nearly enough – has just published my latest.

In ‘It’s Time to Cleans the White House Press Corps”, arguments are laid out for why the gaggle of journalists assigned to cover the president and his affairs should be thoroughly pruned down.  Not just because too many of them have demonstrated they can’t strive for impartiality either.  If for no other reason it’s because “traditional” outlets like CNN and Washington Post have had their audiences wiped out over the course of recent years, while more “alternative” media has emerged as the inheritors of that mantle.

Here’s a snippet:

When the Internet first came into widespread use, it was envisioned that it would bring with it the end of gatekeeping. Never more

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Chris Knight's avatar

Think the blogosphere needs the Internet? Bah! A dude in Liberia on the west coast of Africa is running a blog devoted to gathering that country’s news and in spite of his old-fashioned technique, he’s got hordes of readers!

In Monrovia, Liberia, there’s a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with dry-erase board and couple markers. (Sorry, internet!) Each morning, at 10:45 AM, Alfred Sirleaf wakes up and heads down to his bulletin board to post the day’s news, culling together a slate of stories his countrymen might otherwise never see. Grateful readers line up in droves, on foot and in cars, to read these updates, in what has been described as the country’s—and probably the world’s—only analog blog.

Hit the above link for video of Mr. Sirleaf and his unique “website”!...

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Chris Knight's avatar

It came to me when I happened to catch tonight’s CBS Evening News (which I don’t usually watch at all).

Want to know how to economically revitalize the newspaper and television news industries, and increase enlightenment among the general public in one fell swoop?

It’s very simple: ban the words “conservative” and “liberal” from usage by professional journalists.

Those words are worse than useless. They are woefully outdated terminology. The only function of “liberalism” and “conservatism” is to excuse one’s own intellectual laziness.

(And truth be known, I’m seeing a lot of laziness in CBS’s reporting tonight… but not really more than one would expect from CNN or Fox News either.)

That’s no doubt a big reason why television and print journalism is suffering a slow and lingering death. The alternatives on the Internet – which are not confining themselves to a paradigm that was faulty well before it was ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Twenty years ago this month, the broadcast of the crackdown on the pro-democracy protesters in Beijing by the Chinese government was widely hailed as the moment that international television news coverage like that of CNN became a serious factor at long last.

That was CNN in 1989.

In 2009 it is Twitter, of all things, that is marking the end of television’s dominance of the news.

Here’s the Twitter feed for most of the “tweets” about what’s going down in Iran. At this hour there’s a massive rally in Tehran by anti-Ahmedinejad protesters. The police have opened fire and killed at least one person. Just about everything we know about all this is coming from regular people who are sending live reports via Twitter.

Remember this well, folks. June 2009 is when people in Iran took hold of the power of “you media” and played it to the hilt. ...

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Remember how years ago we used to laugh at Pravda, the government-run newspaper of the Soviet Union? It would only print whatever news that the state deemed fit… and only with whatever spin that the Communist Party wanted it to have.

Here’s one more reason why the United States will soon have to owe the old Soviets an apology: there’s now a bill in Congress to “bail out” the struggling newspaper industry. If it becomes legislation, print news companies that accept government aid will be restructured as nonprofit, and will be banned from making political endorsements (very much like how churches are granted nonprofit status so long as their ministers don’t endorse candidates).

What the hell is happening to this country? I mean… government-managed newspapers?!?

Hey, I’ve worked in the newspaper industry. As a reporter. Twice. And there are a lot of reasons why newspapers are dying. And almost ...

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I’ve long contended that the most accurate perception of what is going on with the United States comes from looking at it from afar. So it is that I find it hard to disagree with what Rupert Cornwell of The New Zealand Herald has written about the newspaper industry and institution in this country. The age of printed media’s supremacy has come to an end, Cornwell declares.

It is very difficult to argue with him. In my own neck of the woods, Media General is furloughing employees for ten days of unpaid leave in an effort to cut costs. It’s now being whispered that my hometown’s The Reidsville Review may not survive past the year. Meanwhile, there is evidence that The New York Times may finally crash and burn come later this spring. Fully a third of American newspapers might be bankrupt come summer, according to the article in ...

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