If you go over to WarrenKinsella.com, the chief spokesman for Warren Kinsella (actually, that would be Kinsella) wrote on March 7 about why MSM journos are mad at him:
A professor from Notre Dame in Indiana and I hooked up at the Liberal convention in Ottawa on the weekend. We had a great chat about the Liberal Party and Jean Chrétien. The professor asked me why mainstream journalists are the people who always seem to get angry with me the most - ie., Jan Wong sending a threatening lawyer's letter about something said about her on this web site, another Globe and Mail columnist issuing legal threats just last month, not a week going by without some old mainstream media fart taking a swing at me/the web site, etc. etc. This is the answer. If I had known about this story when I met with my American friend, I would have shown it to him.
"Their influence is shrinking with each passing day," I told him. "People read them less and less, and distrust them more and more. When the water dries up, as someone once said, the animals start looking at each other differently."
"This" was a link to a story carried on globetechnology.com. Here are some excerpts from it:
Eighteen per cent of American adults cited the Internet as one of their two main sources of news about the presidential races, compared with 3 per cent in 1996. The reliance on television grew slightly to 78 per cent, up from 72 per cent.
Meanwhile, the influence of newspapers dropped to 39 per cent last year, from 60 per cent in 1996, according to the joint, telephone-based survey from the Pew Research Center for The People and the Press and the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Nonetheless, Americans who got campaign news over the Internet were more likely to visit sites of major news organizations like CNN and The New York Times (43 per cent) rather than Internet-only resources such as candidate websites and web journals, known as blogs (24 per cent).
Twenty-eight per cent said they primarily used news pages of America Online Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other on-line services, which carry dispatches from traditional news sources like The Associated Press and Reuters.
“It's a channel difference not a substantive difference,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet group and author of the study. “Newspaper executives probably now have to think of themselves less as newspaper people and more as content people.”
Here's the full study.
I gotta go to work, so I'll comment more fully later.
But to me, the survey says that people aren't necessarily abandoning newspapers and TV (actually, TV edged up slightly), but are instead getting newspaper content from the Internet.
And if they get it from the Associated Press or Reuters via Yahoo, AOL, Google News or some other online aggregation service, where do people think it came from?
And can we take a U.S. study and directly apply it to the Canadian situation? I suspect not.
I'm ba-aack!
I'm going through the study. Here are some findings:
The Internet is now more important than radio for online Americans; 18 per cent of them said it was their prime source of campaign news, compared to 17 per cent for radio.
If you ask people with broadband access (about 27 per cent of the U.S. populace), 38 per cent cite the Internet as a main source, compared to 36 per cent who pick newspapers.
The poll went on to define online politics user community as someone who either sought out campaign information online, discussed the election using e-mail, or used the Internet to to participate directly in campaign activities. It came out to about 61 per cent of Internet users, or 75 million people.
(Note: the U.S. population is 294 million. By my calculation, about 202 million were eligible to vote in the 2004 election; so the online politics user community represents about 37 per cent of eligible voters).
On balance, that community said the Internet gave them important information and raised the quality of public debate.
The poll found the online audience is getting more mainstream and diverse; it used to be skewed to the white, well-off male crowd.
Interestingly, while Kerry supporters were more active online, the online community went 53-47 for Dubya. Frankly, I think that's because the Bushies relied heavily on the faith-based community for support, and they don't need no stinkin' facts. :)
Getting to the meat of Kinsella's point about declining MSM influence, heres some numbers on where people got their online news:
- 43% of online political news consumers (those 63 million people who got campaign news and information online) said they went most often to the news sites of major news organizations such as CNN and the New York Times.
- 28 % said they went most often to the news pages of online services such as AOL and Yahoo.
- 11% said they went most often to the site of a local news organization.
- 24% say they went most often to get campaign news to candidate Web sites, sites that specialize in politics, issue-oriented Web sites, government Web sites, and a smattering of other sources such as blogs or non-mainstream news sites.
So again, when they went online for political news, the vast majority were going to to some version of an MSM site to do it.
If you look at the media landscape chart of the survey (pg. 13 of the .pdf), national newspapers like the NYT or USA Today only 10 per cent of respondents said they read such papers regularly and another 14 per cent sometimes, for a total of 24 per cent.
Blogs were read regularly by two per cent of respondents and sometimes by another three per cent, for a total of five per cent.
But when you compare Internet users with people who don't use the Internet, television is still the dominant source of campaign news for either category (p. 18).
In both the U.S. and in this country, television still uses a lot of MSM reporters and columnists as commentators, which further expands their zone of influence.
Name the Canadian blogger (not a politico or journo turned blogger) who was called upon to join the televised pundit ranks in the last Canadian federal election.
While some U.S. bloggers like Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos fame were asked to write columns by papers like The Guardian, I don't think too many of the top bloggers (if any) got to play TV pundit.
And despite the impressive growth of the Internet's audience share, as we've seen, it's mostly been the MSM websites that have benefited, not independent voices. I would suspect that's true in Canada too.
The bloggers' time may well come. But it isn't here yet.
So I think Mr. Kinsella (who was kind enough to both acquiese to an interview request and say nice things about this blog in the past :) ) is reaching a bit when he says MSMers are mad at him because their world is crumbling.