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If some reformer is looking for a worthy project, how
about restoring the teaching of Latin to our public
schools? Then Americans might know that media
is the
plural of medium
and not a singular noun. Thus we
would be spared such solecisms as The biased liberal
media is ignoring all the good news from Iraq.
Granted, most modern dictionaries no longer label this
usage as illiterate,
but treating media
as a
singular is especially inaccurate these days, given the
variety of media we now enjoy.
We can start with biased liberal media.
I've
finally found some. Our satellite dish delivers an obscure
channel called FSTV,
which stands for Free Speech
Network.
It offers scores of left-wing documentaries
and speeches by folks like Noam Chomsky, along with Gay USA
and Democracy Now
from Amy Goodman.
Most of this is far too serious and depressing for my
taste, but fortunately Comedy Central offers a
side-splitting dose of biased liberal media almost every
weekday with Jon Stewart at The Daily Show
and
Stephen Colbert, parodying Fox's Bill O'Reilly at The
Colbert Report.
Airing at the same time (if there is a media conspiracy,
it lies in how the networks always schedule two or three
shows of my favorite programs at the same time, while
putting nothing worth watching on all 120 channels most of
the time) is another fine and funny biased liberal media
production, Countdown with Keith Olbermann
on
MSNBC.
Those programs have fairly small audiences, though, and
right-thinking critics generally aim their slings and
arrows at the MSM,
which stands for Mainstream
Media,
and which is presumed to be a hotbed of
socialism or worse.
One paradox in this view is that it often accompanies some bragging about large ratings for Rush Limbaugh's radio rantings as well as how Fox News leads the cable news channels. By definition, one would think, a program with a big audience is in the American mainstream. So with Limbaugh and Fox as part of the flow, the MSM couldn't be all that liberal.
Liberal critics often assail the Corporate Media.
This seems contradictory, too, since those doing the
assailing are generally doing so via the corporate media.
Besides, just about any enterprise of any size in this
country is incorporated, even if it's a tree-hugging
knee-jerk bleeding-heart non-profit.
To put this another way, Countdown
is
delightfully anti-Bushite, but it comes from a network
owned by Microsoft, the world's largest software company,
and NBC, a division of General Electric, a major defense
contractor. The phrase Corporate Media
doesn't mean
conservative, any more than the phrase Mainstream
Media
means liberal.
With technological developments that made all of us Time
Magazine's Person of the Year,
we now have the
New Media
and the Legacy Media,
too. We also
have predictions of the imminent demise of Legacy Media,
especially newspapers.
Granted, the industry has lost significant classified-ad revenue to web offerings like Craigslist, and the process of slicing up dead trees and putting ink on them before physical delivery sounds rather antiquated. But newspapers, magazines and junk mail still operate.
In the 1920s, there were predictions that radio would kill newspapers. It caused some changes, like the elimination of most extra editions, but newspapers remained. In the 1950s, TV was going to demolish both radio and newspapers. It didn't.
So it's hard to believe that podcasts, Youtube, blogs
and all the other New Media
will displace the
Legacy Media,
especially newspapers.
Newspapers require no special equipment, and you can
read them anywhere. They come to your door, and you can get
one for pocket change. When you're done with one, you can
use it for lining the birdcage or starting a fire in the
woodstove. And most of them, as opposed to much of the
New Media,
have writers and editors who care about
the difference between singular and plural.
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