Facebook Defeats MSM!

For the past couple of years, my internet consumption has been divided into roughly 3 parts.  I get most of my news from the Huffington Post.  Sure, I follow links from there to other places, but they’re fairly comprehensive.  They keep me up to date on celebrity gossip and the major

New York's Arab Spring

news items of the day – or so I thought.  I go to Wonkette for entertainment.  Seriously.  They are way, way funnier than the Onion or Cracked.com, although I sometimes check them out, too.  And, of course, Facebook, which my friend Jim Freeman once described as “the gift that keeps on taking.”  I mock it, I criticize it, but I’ve got to admit I love it.

The Huffington Post, of course, is an online newspaper, which gives them several advantages over the print media.  They can update as fast as a story breaks.  They’ve got no space limitations.  And they are still evolving.  Unfortunately, they seem to view themselves as part of the mainstream media, the status quo.

And so, despite the fact that the “Occupy Wall Street” protests have been going on in New York for a week, I just learned about them this morning on Facebook.  Wonkette may have had something, but I’m not really looking for news there.  After finding out about them on Facebook, about how harmless women who were already confined behind a police barricade and clearly unarmed and not even slightly dangerous, were suddenly and without any real provocation pepper sprayed; about how a man was brutally thrown to the ground and handcuffed for writing the word “Love” on the sidewalk -in chalk; about how a group of well dressed 21st century Marie Antoinettes stood on their balconies and drank champagne, laughing at the plight of the unemployed, the uninsured, the homeless, the American desperate class; I went looking for the story on Huffington Post and I did find it, buried well below Herman Cain’s straw poll win in Florida, a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a couple of things about taxes, an article on some mass graves in Libya, a dog eating festival in Asia, a piece by Alec Baldwin on why he didn’t attend the Emmy Awards Ceremony,  and many other stories.

But everything they had, I’d already seen on Facebook.  It seems the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover these protests, and the Huffington Post views itself as part of the mainstream media.

So, I guess we will just have to carry on informing each other.  If the mainstream media withers on the vine and eventually dies, it will be their own fault.  Report the news or GTFO.