Democracy revived?

Cruising through my e-mail this morning when I read my weekly newsletter from prwatch.org. Picked up this little gem.

Newspaper readers have always had their little "letters to the editor" section, if they can get in. But cheap online tools have given anyone with a Net connection the chance to start a publication, a Weblog, a chat room, a bulletin board. Citizen media sites focused on tiny communities give journalists a role as content shepherds, whipping the chaos of reader-generated content into a manageable morass.

Ah yes indeed, the web may yet revitalise democracy in the west. Call me a hoepless romantic but I honestly feel that things like weblogs and the online communities in general that been spawned by the web have an oppurtunity to wrest control of folks information digestion back off the big media oultets.

Just last night I watched a program that argued that the US press in particualr has been undergoing some extreme introspection since 9/11 and they are starting to admit that they may have been wrong to so blindly follow the Whitehouse's lead. The program very eloquently argued why the big media organisations did what they did which was partly driven by commercial interests and a need to be seen as fairly and squarely *patriotic*. And some even admitted that following Fox with it's lowest common denominator approach had been a bad move. The implication being that they wouldn't do it again, but will they? Murdoch - no relation, is being portrayed as the bad guy here! Which reminds me must go see that movie about Murdoch and the press, as well as the one about "Corporations"