The Meaning Of Mainstream

If, like me, you spend a good deal of your time reading blogs, you are all too familiar with one phrase (and its abbreviation) and the vitriol that so often accompanies its mention: mainstream media. MSM.

My personal favorite analysis on the subject comes from William Wolfe, who attempted to parse the hatred at McSweeney's:

Reasons Bloggers Hate the Mainstream Media.
The MSM is too liberal.
Professor always calls on the MSM.
Bloggers got stood up at prom. By the MSM.

"The mainstream blogosphere (MSB) is only too happy to bury the old media regime, because it has an implicit vision for a new order, one that would largely consist of ... bloggers. In other words, they envision a universe that resembles the nineteenth-century partisan newspapers or the Fleet Street model, where writers and thinkers break from the illusion of "objectivity" and print the "truth." (I acknowledge that the liberal blogosphere is hardly a monolith and that blogs don't always lend themselves to coherent thought, but common themes and arguments are clear enough.)"

"People have taken my coinage 'Mainstream Blogosphere' seriously. But I'll be the first to concede that it's a dumb, adolescent term. I simply wanted to highlight the stupidity of the ubiquitous 'Mainstream Media.' There are, of course, lots of liberal bloggers that I respect (e.g. Marshall, Yglesias, Drum) for their reporting, analytical capabilities, and writing. And they shouldn't be lumped with the likes of the ranters and cheap shot artists who I have critiqued. Similarly, CNN, NPR, and The Washington Post are very different beasts, who don't deserve to be polemically lumped together so often. That's just sloppy.

"The silly people over at the New Republic seem to be obsessed with the use of the term 'mainstream media.' I think it is, in part, due to the fact that as is often the case the media tends to internalize right wing critiques and then get confused by left wing critiques. It's actually a term I try not to use all that much, though for a lack of a better term I inevitably do use it, and I think I've thus far managed to avoid using the conservatarian blogger term 'MSM.' I don't consider the term to be in itself an insult, but simply a general category (which may at times be deserving of insult.)"

"Basically I'm referring to the larger supposedly non-ideological print outlets (papers like the Times and the Post, magazines like Time and Newsweek,) National Public Radio's news/talk programs, PBS's Newshour, CNN, MSNBC, the news programs of the 3 major national networks, etc. ... It's not a pejorative. It's just a classification."

"In fact, there are tons of blogs and wikis and email lists that have larger readerships than most of the so-called 'MSM.' If Daily Kos was a newspaper, it would rank #5 in circulation (it would've been #3 last October, in the runup to the election). The top blogs have more readers than most cable news channel shows have viewers. And while their circulation numbers and ratings fall, our numbers continue to grow. So really, why do we continue to self-marginalize by pretending we're not mainstream?"

"It's political neutral, it has no negative connotations. It doesn't put old media on a pedestal, as though it was more 'legitimate' than new interactive media. It doesn't imply that we are tiny niches while they speak to the mainstream and the masses."