Bloggers, journalism and Media Giants

If you remember back in 2001 when AOL and Time Waner merged, you'll get my point quickly.
AOL Time Waner susidiaries Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema are among the top 10 motion picture poducers. Warner music group artists account for 38 of the top 200 best selling albums and 16% of all US album sales. Time Waner Cable provides channels such as HBO, TBS, CNN, TNT, Nickelodeon and I believe the WB as well. Other media giants like Walt Disney that holds ABC, ESPN and Lifetime and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. that includes Fox, book publishers and a ton of newspapers, magazines and Twentieth Century Fox are in the same scale. Sony of Japan owns Columbia Pictures, IMAX, CBS and Columbia records, and Square-Enix. Viacom owns Paramount, MTV, CBS, Simon and Schuster, and blockbuster.

That's five corporations that own just about everything in the media that you'll ever see.

What will happen to our "respected" and "established" journalism when these corporations decide that the public just doesn't need to know something? What if they want the public to believe that the world was going to end and crammed their entire media-scape with made up stories and facts full-force into our heads? They can do it because we have a freedom of speech that allows them to tell us whatever they want. Bloggers have the same freedom and can easily express it on the Internet. Who the public chooses to believe is a different matter.

Are bloggers REAL journalists?

The answer is yes and no. While bloggers do have to work their way up from being an unknown writer to a respected one, they are still viewed as just bloggers. What's the distinction then? The line is pretty vague. No they aren't journalists because they report news with no compensation and aren't screened to some extent by an established media source such as a newspaper or television station. Then again, they are journalists for the same reason. The best kind in fact. What bloggers write while usually just opinion, there are no restrictions to what they say. You will never, ever see the anchor on MSNBC reporting on the lax security of Microsoft operating systems or how their products are half-assed at best. The only form of mass-media that exists without explicit gatekeeping is the Internet. People can say whatever they want, whether it is offensive, pointless and not remotely true in any sense. Whether or not it's really accurate is irrelevant. Who's to say what we see on "established" and "respected" media is true at all?