Everybody's talking at me...

By Libby

The news is boring me senseless today. I've spent most of my time clearing out old saved links and realizing for all we obsess about the current news cycle, how little changes over time. Take blogs and the media for instance.

Three years ago, Ezra Klein was wondering if embarrassment over their misreporting on the Schiavo debacle would kill off Powerline and came up with one of my favorite analogies.

It's not just that they have no shame, it's that they once met shame on a street, beat the shit out of him, rolled him up in a carpet, and threw him off a bridge. And don't even ask me about the nightmare they put truth through. To paraphrase Marv in Sin City, after what they did to poor honesty, hell must have seemed like heaven.

He asked, "So enough's enough -- can we please stop taking them seriously?" We did do that but it didn't stop them. All that happened is they gave up their weird psycho-sexual nicks.

In 2004 WaPo posted the readers choice best political blogs. National Review's The Corner swept the categories. Kos and Atrios got honorable mentions. That hasn't changed much around the Village.

Around the same time Fox News was bemoaning bloggers, Air America was just starting out, political credentials for blogs has been issued for the first time and everyone was predicting what effect Blogtopia would have on the media.

Blah-blah-blogging may be just a craze to Fox, but to almost everyone else it's already a terrifyingly powerful influence on what the media say and how they say it. And it's an influence that the world's talk radio hosts ignore at their peril.

Turns out we didn't kill right wing radio.

And in 2005, journalists were trying to shut down Fox afiliates.

Two TV journalists have challenged the broadcast license renewal of WTVT Fox-13 asserting it deliberately broadcast false and distorted news reports. [...]

The challenge stems from what the reporters describe as a year-long experience working at the station where they resisted their managers who, they allege, repeatedly ordered them to distort a series of news reports about the secret use of an artificial hormone injected in dairy cattle throughout Florida and nationally.

Fox is still there. Their ratings have slipped some since, but they're hiding facts and lying more than ever and getting away with it. It's not that we haven't had an effect on the narrative, but in the end it seems for all the talking we do, there still aren't enough people listening to each other.