Where do you think the quotes below come from? Some chippy demablogger, with a grudge against mainstream media? Have a read, as it criticizes:

the inequities and limitations of the international journalism provided by “traditional media.”

[news agencies] manufacture a bland and homogeneous, but still ideologically distinctive, view of the world…

[news providers] are demonstrably wedded to journalism as tied to established power and promotional culture as it can be.

While the online news industry continues to pretend for the moment that it brings readers a diversity of reporting on world news, it is a pretence which cannot last.

…new media will continue to present to most users the dangerous illusion of multiple perspectives…

Actually, it’s not some agency-hating rant from Michelle Malkin or Little Green Footballs from an academic paper by Chris Paterson that takes a look at the availability of news agency material online. Paterson notes what anyone who’s ever hit a news search knows – AP and Reuters material is everywhere. Where are we heading with all this?

The internet has fully transitioned into what we have traditionally regarded as “old media:” it is now, for most users, a mass medium providing mostly illusory interactivity and mostly illusory diversity.

Most users? Yes proles, that’s you. Thank goodness some enlightened souls can see through the illusion!

[HT: Richard Sambrook]