Where will we get news?

Regardless of what different people try to tell the American public about what is and isn’t news, and about how information should or shouldn’t be received, it’s clear that people will get information no matter what stands in their way. People don’t care if their local paper goes under. Why should they? Time and time again, experience has shown us that the investigative spirit of news reporting continues in whatever way it can.

For example, those who don’t consider Fox News “news” would still have found it a useful resource for the Van Jones debacle. Fox was the only major news organization to report on the former environmental adivisor’s inflamatory statements, which was ignored by such traditional media giants as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS.

Another reason to not despair about the news is that blogs can handle it. It was the blog BigGovernment.com that broke the story about ACORN corruption. Even before that, before blogs were on the radar as a threat to traditional news outlets, blogs were being used to correct the news. It was through blogs that documents presented by CBS anchor Dan Rather that allegedly showed President Bush had evaded the draft were shown to be forgeries.

Obviously, there isn’t a shortage of news. And where the traditional media has faltered, new media has prevailed. Print media is in trouble; The President has declared that the Fox News Network is “talk radio”, and he hasn’t been not the only one to have expressed concerns about the proliferation of news on blogs.

Still, we’ve got it better than ever.