Blogs have different roots than mainstream media (MSM). Both stem from the First Amendment.

In the time of Ben Franklin, the printing press was not anywhere as sophisticated as it became and it required a relatively simple capital investment--not like the newspaper factories that were later to come that required a huge building, fleets of trucks and hawkers on the street.

Blogs are about people's opinions. MSM is a business enterprise, owned by corporations out to get advertisers in and are driven by profits. MSM prints what it thinks is important--and that is the First Amendment right that the corporations are exercising.

Bloggers, for the most part, are not part of a corporation, although some corporations are inviting bloggers into user groups and that is an interesting phenomenon.

Corporations are interested in making money. That is also allowed. They are also allowed to own media--as "persons," but there is the rub. They reflect what is good for them--again, perfectly legal under the First Amendment--make money reporting news that think is important.

Bloggers, for the most part, are not out to make a living giving their private opinions. There may be a blogger here and there who has figured out how to make money by blogging, but mostly blog sites do not pay for themselves, let alone the rent.

Yet we do it because it is how we communicate when the MSM does not cover news we think is important or publish our views.

Take the guy, who some 20 years ago, was feeling his view was not covered by the media. He would stand in Harvard Square, for instance, and hand out his Xerox(tm) copies and most people who not read them and if they did, the newspaper had far more power to reach millions with its spin on what was important.

But it was Voltaire, I believe, who said "to a philosopher, all news is gossip." That is, once an idea is understood, repetition of the incidents is kind of like gossip and I admit that I am someone who succumbs to reading and listening to gossip, even in the narrow sense, let alone the broad sense Voltaire had in mind.

Now that guy no longer stands in Harvard Square watching people wad up his hand bills or suffering the added indignity of being told he's a crackpot. He may well be, but today he can put up his blog page and stand in the public square, as it were, and tell his story. He can be report on his interaction with the public utility or that he believes he was abducted by space aliens.

For the freedom of the press to truly be free it must be available to all, not just the multi-millionaires or large corporations who have the cash to put their message out. They still drown out the little guy, but to get back to Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School who wrote "The Inventor's Dilemma," ISBN 0-06-662069-4. Small corporations and inventors unseat the big boys. Chasing profits, the large corporations do the right thing and go for profitable big-margin markets and leave the smaller markets to the dog-eat-dog competitors. Christensen gave several examples--the most recent was one in a lecture about mini-mill steel and how the big integrated producers abandoned rebar and then bars and rod and then structural steel (great graph on page 104 that I do not have permission to reprint) that shows how the large producers retreated out into oblivion.

MSM is under siege as local events are followed by bloggers who may not be as accurate, but they have a cost advantage and there are enough of them that although there are "crazy" stories, the world is not about to melt down in a morass of misinformation because some blogger got his/her facts wrong. Newspapers and MSM get their facts wrong all the time.

This issue is about people speaking for themselves and not having some newspaper print a photo that is captioned, "these people are here because they support (or do not support)" something or other. The media has an idea that balance and fairness required opposing views to be debated and frankly many of us have shit television news off because it has become shrill hate mongering and most of them now, in me opinion, are like the guy 20 years ago in Harvard Square whose reasons for saying what he's saying are suspect.

News is no longer about facts--its a form of entertainment.

We are the New Rome and our circus is the media where verbal gladiators battle it out --along with sports.

Sports. Hmm. I look at USA Today, a "good" paper. There is one fourth of it devoted to sports. This is important? There are so many things more important than which team won what and what does that have to do with anything? Nothing.

In the meantime a lot of people have shut off their televisions, stopped reading newspapers and news magazines and are heading out to hear fresh ideas and read about issues that are important to them.

And now the MSM is running scared and saying bloggers are trying to dismantle MSM. No--MSM has simply abandoned the field. No longer are there two hometown papers and in some cities there isn't even one. In a small town, the home paper takes national feeds and recycles the news from the larger papers and news sources. This move by corporations to get out of this business is hardly created by bloggers.

Bloggers may be the rebar of news, but to blame bloggers for nipping at the heels of MSM is not quite right.