The LA Times is going to start running ads on its front page. Patterico:

The paper already runs ads for Democrats on the front page. They might as well get paid for it.

As he notes, it's painful to watch a slow death, even when it's well deserved.

I once had a thought that it must have been simpler 40 years ago. You got your news from the local paper and the six o'clock news, and you based your political view on that and on talking to your friends. Now it's much more complicated--there are many more news sources, there are faked photographs and documents, and everyone seems to have a political agenda.

Then I realized that the simple truth is that 40 years ago too few people had too much control of how we get news. The idea that those in control of the news had some superhuman "objectivity," so much better than the average man that they new what was newsworthy and how it should reported, is simply a wrong idea.

Now is better, and, for now, continuing to get better.

By the way, I've always thought one idea I've heard of determining the truth of historic things based on eyewitness reports is kind of odd. The idea is along the lines of "anything which is reported which is against the beliefs of the one reporting it is much more likely to be true." This makes a certain sense--a ufo skeptic reporting a ufo siting is much more believable than a ufo afficiando doing so. But ultimately, it seems that the people who care about something are going to be the people who know the most about it and do the most reporting--so wouldn't the better thing to do be to ask "how reliable is this witness? Are the beliefs of the witness making them see things that are not there?"

I agree that parallel information paths are superior to what is essentually a serial path through the MSM. The external world is very complex, and the information bandwidth relatively small, so the data tends to get coded into compact, if inaccurate symbols before it gets to the news comsumer. Unfortunately, this gives an inordinate amount of power to a few people, namely the ones who do the coding. If their POV is more or less monolithic, then the small end of the pipe is likely to lose a lot of important information in the process, or worse, end up feeding a lot of people a narrative derived more from the coder's biases than reality.

A structural argument on why the internet should be expanded into a news gathering instrument instead of just a means of distribution. I'd like to see more small yet diverse news sources operating out there.

Is 100M livejournals/my_space pages and 1M+ blogs not enough for you K?