By Brad Friedman on 4/26/2005, 2:46pm PT  

Juan Cole gets it right in his highly recommend piece today pointing out exactly why and how the MSM's required 15% profit margin has killed the entire industry and is bringing the rest of the country down with it. It's America (and the rest of the world!) which suffers from the corporate media delinquency, of course, as profit has replaced the public service that once was "the news".

Back in the day, news was always a loss-leader. It wasn't meant to make money, but to perform a public service. Back in the day, while CBS lost money with their extraordinary news gathering operation, Bill Paley was proud of that jewel in the "tiffany network's" crown. In America 2005, however, losing money for the good of the nation will not be tolerated. And those of us who understand that it's about issues and public safety and governmental responsible will be branded as America Haters in the process.

As Cole smartly puts it, "We don't care."

Read the whole piece if you can. It closes with this money quote...

And this difference, my friends, accounts for why bloggers get vilified. Journalists can be switched to another story, or fired, or their stories can be buried on page 36. We can't be fired. So if Martin Peretz doesn't like what we have to say, he will publish a hatchet job on us in The New Republic, seeking to make us taboo. If you can't shut people up, and you really don't want their voices heard, then all you can do is try to persuade others not to listen to them or give them a platform. The easiest way to do this is to falsely accuse them of racism or Communism some other character flaw unacceptable to polite society. Because of the distributed character of blogging "computing," however, such tactics are probably doomed to fail.

We are not the mainstream media, and we are here. Get used to it.

Indeed.

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