The past couple of days have been interesting, to say the least, when looking at recent shifts and decisions in American legislatures. Specifically, the House is looking to shield bloggers from federal investigations by providing them with the same protections as reporters, and that after the telecommunication companies that ‘theoretically’ (read: actually) cooperated with NSA […]

The essay that I am discussing was one of the two that won The Dalton Camp Award this year. You can read the full version of the essay at the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting website.

Generally, Lewis’s argument can be summed up in his line “thanks to weblogs, any civic-minded citizen with a computer, a modem and the moxie to express their opinions can contribute to the media and the public dialogue.” Blogs provide a way for citizens to break through the increasing corporate control of media outlets - only 1% of newspapers are independently owned today,and in this environment blogs provide a way of expanding the number of news sources because its low cost of entry. Free services such as Blogger and Livejournal, where all of the hard work is done by a company behind the scenes, are perfect for citizen-journalists to quickly begin publishing.

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Ultimately Lewis’ arguments are a good start towards looking that the benefits of blogging, but his failure (or unwillingness given the award this essay was written for) to genuinely examine the conglomeration of mass media institutions, compression of citizen and consumer, and perception of blogs as just a new way of keeping news organizations honest, fails to identify or suggest solutions to the larger issues surrounding the mass media as it exists today.