As a Blog I suppose I have nothing but praise for the Internet and its concept of the worldwide posting of words, so powerful that in an instant it does away with the 24 hour news cycle to the degree that the mainstream media monitors blogs and blogs itself, reports on other bloggers, and when you inject the social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, in which the mainstream media participates, the words in numbers exponentially go beyond comprehension.

The mainstream media is not enamored with the Internet because they believe it is apocalyptic to their profession.

And to a degree it has been, there are fewer newspapers today than yesterday, fewer magazines, fewer jobs for journalists.

Local news has made a segue to the Internet, eliminating both daily and weekly newspapers and affecting advertising revenue.

Somehow the journalists of today are anybody, TV stations call for their videos instantly transmitted to their offices via cell phones, their verbal reports of a disaster and of course their jpegs taken on a still cameras.

Freelancers abound working for numerous outlets, either on the Internet or for the mainstream TV stations.  How many so called ‘contributors’ do the major TV networks and cable stations have?  Numerous ‘contributors.’  When Juan Williams got bounced from the left wing NPR, which is funded by the taxpayer, he was given a greater role at Fox to provide the other side of their right wing journalistic leanings.  Contributors are paid for their alleged expertise.  But many of them are not journalists and they certainly are not staffers.  That is not the case with Juan Williams, he is a respected journalist and columnist and provides the left wing balance Fox is looking for when doing political analysis.

The question here with respect to the mainstream media is simple when it comes to the Internet?  Where are the checks and balances that a story must go through, the editors challenging each and every fact – it does not take place with most Blogs with no staff, nor do Blogs have the credibility of the established print and TV media moguls.

Even Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, the premier King of Blogs, has delivered falsehoods, despite his success with the Monica Lewinsky story, which was fed to him by a reporter from Newsweek when the latter turned down the story, perhaps for its own political leanings?

Whether we like it or not the Internet is here, but free and open communications, is not something the world embraces.  China has arrested Blogs and has attempted to block major servers such as Google from breaking through to reach their citizens, although even I get hits in China.

In the United States the FCC is looking into ways to administratively control the Internet and the UN recently put together a task force to look into worldwide control of the Internet.  It did a walk back on its administrative procedure, however, when it was pointed out their committee did not have any representation from the Internet.

Much of this came to a head when Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and a resident of Australia released thousands of US classified information, much of it more embarrassing than revealing, which he received from a Pfc in the US Army.

However, who did he release this information to?  He released it to the New York Times; they put a staff of reporters on the materials and determined what was relevant to release, exposing the story worldwide.  The US Justice Department is still trying to ferret out what they can do with this case.  To date no charges on this specific issue have been filed.

I will leave it to others at this time to debate the relevance of this exposure and whether Assange violated international espionage laws or whether the New York Times, a US publication, violated something in the first amendment of the US Constitution.

This ‘Think’ piece came about when someone sent me the following quote and accompanying headline:

What Have We Learned In 2,064 Years?

“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled,
public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom
should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to
foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt.
People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”

- Cicero – 55 BC

This quote was so relevant to today on a worldwide basis, as it was for Rome then, and many countries today, including the US, that I thought I had to publish it.  However, before I did, I had to find out whether Cicero really said this some 2,000 years ago.  Cicero, you see was often misquoted.  As my research showed – through the Internet – and those that have researched what he said and didn’t say – he actually said this, to the best of my research; basing my research on sources that I deemed reliable – because I wasn’t around then, and couldn’t find anyone else that was!

You see, “Words Never Die On The Internet,” no matter how accurate or inaccurate they might be.