This Week's UPC Gravitational Pull Up

PSoTD's Gravitational Pull Up for the week asks:

In your opinion, what segment of society or culture or the economy is in greatest need to be reached by political blogs at this time?

My working theory about the media is that the ongoing fusion of entertainment and news has produced a morass indistinguishable from the Roman 'bread and circus' concept. No, I'm not the first to make this comparison, but with the boom in so called 'reality television', and the media's unwillingness to impose any standard of truth on the talking heads and pundits who inhabit its dominion, the idea becomes more relevant all the time.

Reality TV is increasingly balanced by unreality news programming where he who spins the fastest wins.

Enter blogs and the changing landscape of print news, where old dailies are increasingly irrelevant but brash independent weeklies with clearly partisan voices are growing at a healthy pace. The last generation of journalists came of age with the idea that they were meant to be objective, to tell two sides of a story. These standards go back to a time when perhaps those employed by the government were genuinely more honest than leaders and their lackeys today. Maybe there were just fewer power players fighting for beltway turf then.

The concept of objectivity in news is over, but the old guard doesn't really have it in them to learn any new tricks. Not to learn them well, anyway. But the next generation of journalists will have a better feel for what their contemporaries want: reporters with a partisan edge who are willing to argue with liars on television and call liars' bluffs in print. This kind of combative, agenda-driven coverage is the reason why the biggest political blogs are not middle-of-the-road outfits, and the lack of it it explains why the "MSM" (excluding Fox News, which has seen massive ratings growth as a result of adopting many of these postures) is increasingly irrelevant in the minds of so many Americans.