Kill the Media

Over at DailyKos there's this post about how everyone's bitching about the media. It's a topic long past due for discussion, though I found this particular entry to be verbose and somehow never quite getting to the actual issue.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page then, I'll be a little more blunt:

Bush won, in large part, because people believed a bunch of lies -- about him, and about Kerry -- and the reason people believed those lies is because they read them in the paper where they were repeated ad nauseam and rarely if ever fact checked by our shamefully sloth-like press. Campaign Desk was on the job, holding the media's feet to the flame, as were several other sites, but clearly that wasn't enough.

The media is showing no signs of changing it's lazy ways, and that's bad news (get it? bad news? Whooooooo!). We need a plan of action.

Maybe, as mentioned over at Kos, some leftie billionaire will buy up or start up a media empire. That'd be great. But really we shouldn't get into the habit of wandering off to fantasy land where we can spend other people's money on our liberal pipe dreams (especially since there's also talk of having these guys buy up diebold as well -- there's only so much money to go around; they do have to eat, you know).

So how about this, instead. We get all the bloggers and all the people who read the blogs and everyone else who feels the press did an absolute shit job, and we all cancel our subscriptions to, say, the New York Times and pledge not to buy a single newsstand issue as well. We each write a letter explaining our dissatisfaction, and we each reference some specific articles to back up our claims (check over at Campaign Desk for this part). And we say we're only going to do it for a month this first time because we're willing to give them a second chance and we'll happily declare our loyalty to the NYT, renewing our subscriptions, should they do a solid job of getting their act together.

The blog community is tremendous, and if we could all commit to this sort of action, I'd bet dollars to donuts we'd get results and we'd get them damn fast. We have no reason to support media outlets that fail to do their jobs and it doesn't hurt to remind them of that from time to time.