Tasty at the ballpark, but downright disgusting when packaged as news.

There are various ways to describe the traditional media in America. By traditional, I mean the media that dominated American newsgathering and dissemination for most of its history, first with the metropolitan daily papers, then radio and finally weekly newsmagazines and the big three television networks: ABC, NBC and CBS.

To some degree, the first all-news cable network, CNN, was and is part of this traditional media mix. But it was the forerunner of the New Media, which has successfully fragmented the monopolistic hold traditional media had on reporting news.

The most common term used to describe traditional media is Mainstream. This misses the mark, however, because it is increasingly irrelevant and no longer in the mainstream of American life. Conservatives derisively refer to it as the Lamestream Media, the Dinosaur Media and the Drive-By Media, among others. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to hang onto Mainstream. I suppose it’s comforting to hearken back to a day when news was controlled by the elite few whose opinions were developed in the vacuum of academia, Manhattan, Chicago and Los Angeles.

It is very rare indeed to find Jon Stewart or Bill Maher satirizing the Mainstream Media sacred cows such as the original networks, The New York Times or Time magazine. Instead, New Media, and particularly media with a conservative bent is on the nightly smirking skewer, probably because it’s a great danger to liberal/progressive orthodoxy.

This orthodoxy, particularly in the latter half of the 20th Century, was always underneath the surface. Though subtle, it drove how stories were prioritized and presented in print and on the air. It was not a conspiracy. It was simply the natural outgrowth of like-minded people working in the same profession.

Still, at least until the advent of New Media, journalists were taught to be skeptical. Outright bias was frowned upon; there were always two sides to the story. But the standards that drove journalists in the past have been all but abandoned in favor of a new kind of crusading journalism. Unfortunately, the crusades are completely one-sided: Global Warming? Settled science. No probing questions shall be asked. Abortion? Pro-choice marches are covered with great fanfare. Pro-life rallies… not so much. Scandals at Acorn and Planned Parenthood where they aid and abet the criminal underworld? Nothing to see here; please move along. The First Amendment? It only applies to us and pornography. The Constitution? Living and breathing until we say it’s set in stone. And so on and so forth…

Thus the Mainstream Media have become the Cheesestream Media, or more accurately, the Processed Cheesestream Media. We no longer get the real cheddar, but the fake stuff they put on nachos at the ballpark.

The Cheesestream Media has becoming a mind-numbing mélange of boring sameness. That’s why I cheer for New Media, whatever its political stripe. It democratizes information, instead of spoon-feeding us with pre-packaged (processed) ideologies and ideas.

So, whenever you hear about this Congressman or that Cheesestream Media apologist calling for more regulation of the Internet or talk radio, it has nothing to do with “fairness” and everything to do with power. It doesn’t matter if you’re a progressive, a libertarian, a plain old liberal or a conservative, the fragmentation of media into various cheese flavors, rather than one processed cheese, is very tasty indeed.

“The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.”

John Adams

Ever since people started reporting on and analyzing the news on the Internet and other new media outside the traditional media outlets, the traditional media has been going through its own version of the Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Grief…

Denial… “This can’t be happening.”

Anger… “Who the hell do these pajama-clad people think they are?”

Bargaining… “Okay. We hate you, so we’ll start doing the same thing.”

Depression… “Our business model sucks and we’re going out of business.”

Acceptance… “Everything will be okay since I can get a federal bailout and have the feds regulate and harass my competition out of business, all in the name of some nebulous public good!”

Fake but accurate: When traditional "journalists" are sure something's true but have no evidence, it's time to go to Kinko's! Image from michellemalkin.com.

Whenever a high-profile blogger gets it wrong, jumps the gun or takes something out of context, the traditional media launches into “I-told-you-so” mode, most recently and notably with the Breitbart/Shirley Sherrod fiasco. However, when one of their own does it, there’s nothing to see (Rathergate).

The traditional media would like nothing better than to consolidate their power in such a way that everyone but the traditional media is held accountable for their actions. I think they call it “accountability journalism,” or what I like to call “baby talk.”

This begs the question: who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Who holds those who wield the sword of accountability accountable? What the traditional media desire is a monopoly on accountability, which is convenient for a demonstrably biased group advancing specific political and ideological agendas. As “gatekeepers” they will ensure the unwashed masses stay outside the gates. Safely inside the gates, the gatekeepers can do whatever the hell they want. Who needs transparency when the gatekeepers are so ethically and morally pure?

Was Breitbart held accountable for posting an out-of-context video? Certainly. Now that the entire video is out and people can see it for themselves they can make their own judgment about it without a monopolistic “accountability” filter designed to tell them what to think.

Fake but accurate: Filmed from multiple angles with hundreds of cell phone cameras recording at the same moment, not one person has come forth with evidence that Tea Partiers screamed racial epithets at black Congressmen who purposely walked the gauntlet to incite the racism that supposedly infuses the Tea Party movement. The accusation may be fake, but the traditional media decided it was accurate so there was no need to verify the veracity of the claims. Now that's accountability journalism!

By the same token, when the media reported with absolute certainty that the N-word was hurled more than a dozen times at black legislators purposely running the Tea Party gauntlet on Capitol Hill, the blogosphere cast serious doubt on this assertion. The traditional media’s reaction? Ignore the evidence and mindlessly repeat a lie since it fits their worldview and narrative.

The traditional media believes the Tea Party is racist, primarily because the Tea Party opposes the first black president’s agenda. In the traditional media narrative, opposition to Obama equals racism. So if A=B is true, then naturally the stuff we make up, C, is true, even if it really didn’t happen.

Rathergate was based on the same thinking. Dan Rather and his colleagues at CBS believed that George W. Bush was a nincompoop and a shirker so they didn’t waste any time double-checking the documents sent to them by a dubious source that helped prove the point. When the documents were shown to be obvious forgeries, Rather and the traditional media circled the wagons. Their final defense? Fake but accurate! I don’t know about you, but I prefer news that’s genuine and accurate.

So, while the traditional media whines and moans about the lack of accountability in the blogosphere, talk radio and Fox News, we’re actually living in a time of hyper-accountability. You can’t publish, post or air anything without someone somewhere holding you to account.

There are obvious drawbacks to this Wild West information age, such as the ease of defamation, but that’s a trade-off I’m willing to make. Information is power, and once concentrated in too few hands it is dangerous.