Little People

Here's a new article from the Annenberg Online Journalism Review at University of Southern California.  Excerpt:

For way too long, it has been the mainstream media (MSM) that's played God with the American public, telling everyone what's news and what's not, what to play up and what to downplay. But 2004 was the year the power started shifting, that the Little People, if you will, started to tell the gods of media what the public really wanted.

And most of that shift happened during the crucible that was the presidential election season. The year dawned with Howard Dean getting slavish press attention for his groundswell of Internet support, both in money raised and in activity on his sizable group Weblog. The campaign ended with the blogosphere quickly trashing documents in the controversial "60 Minutes" report on President Bush's National Guard service. Even before there was a full report on what went wrong at CBS News, Dan Rather announced he was leaving his long-time anchor post.