February 26, 2006

Blogosphere Video Will Give The Public and the Politicians a Chance to Meet in a Way MSM Never Has

These video interviews that Pajamas Media is doing are revolutionary. They're far more in-depth than the sound bites the networks hand out, and which MSM cherry-picks so as to bias the news in favor of their outdated and counterproductive preferred political policies. Astonishingly, interviews like those PJM is doing, make it possible for Congressmen to be seen and heard in some ways for the first time.

Here's an example in which we've got Congressman Tom Lantos talking about cooperation on the part of leading Internet companies with China in repressing free speech:

Congressman Lantos: These enterprises which have grown so powerful, so wealthy, so full of themselves, apparently have very little social conscience. Apparently they don't appreciate that their success is the result of a free and open and democratic society. What I'm suggesting is, that they do something in addition to doing business merely according to the laws of a repressive regime. I still remember IBM'S cooperation with Hitler's Nazi regime. And IBM's excuse was that they are just obeying the law.

Roger L. Simon: Do you think that some of the difficulty may be related to their competition with each other? That one of them is afraid that if one of their opponents gets a foothold in China, the other will lose out and that's the end of the story?

Congressman Lantos: That's perfectly possible. But there are higher values than market share. Market share is not the ultimate value for which people have laid down their lives.

And here's another one, in which Congressman Hoekstra discusses the vast amount of intel that's been captured on pre-war Iraq, which has yet to be even translated, much less analyzed:

Congressman Hoekstra: There seems to be credible evidence that weapons of mass destruction moved [from Iran] to Syria, and at least that evidence needs to be followed up, to either be proven or disproven. [.....] There's somewhere between 35,000 and 55,000 boxes of documents that have never been fully exploited. There's information that is available. We just need a more intense and urgent effort to get into it.

...for the 35 to 55,000 boxes of documents, they're out of Iraq. They, from my perspective, they ought to be put on the internet. We ought to have Arabic speakers from around the world translating these documents, other people analyzing them, and unleash the power of the net on these 55,000 boxes of documents to see exactly what went on.

I was honestly surprised to see and hear these Congressmen speaking so well, so earnestly, and with so much of significance in what they said. It adds a lot to it to be able to see them. As soon as I saw these videos I realized that I'd been misled by a lifetime of listening to MSM's distortions, into thinking that all Congressmen were more or less blowhards who couldn't produce a straightforward, human, interesting thing to say.

These Congressmen are talking plain sense in a way you'd never discover via MSM's constant distortion, soundbite-based editing, and gratuitous distrust of all things pertaining to the U.S. government. 

These Congressmen want to tell us what they mean -- but MSM has prevented them from doing so. MSM, instead of being the megaphone of the politicians, has become their muffler. MSM has become a gatekeeper that perpetuates its own power by severely restricting the ability of the politicians to meet and communicate with their public.

The blogosphere-based media is going to shake all that up and let these politicians be presented fairly to the public, in some ways for the first time.

(This blog is a PJM member site).