The organism whose provision of a biological function is inferior to another's cannot survive indefinitely, says Darwin. If centralized, patrician-elite media is increasingly unable to follow its charter of relaying objective information to the general public — instead inhibited by self-imposed, self-defining limits, then better institutions will take from it the controlling share of the national discussion. From a systems analyst's chair, Wretchard of Belmont Club explains:
The blogosphere is a specific manifestation — and by no means the only one — of the networks made possible by the Internet which can be imperfectly compared to the emerging nervous system of a growing organism. Once the software and infrastructure to self-publish was in place, it was natural that analytical cells, or groups of cells would take inputs from other parts of the system and process them. The result was 'instant punditry', which was nothing more than the public exchange of analysis on any subject — politics, culture and war just happened to be the three most popular. It enabled lawyers to offer opinions on law; military men on things military; scientists on things scientific. And suddenly the journalistic opinion editors found themselves at an increasing disadvantage. While individual bloggers might not have the journalistic experience of the newspaper professionals, they had the inestimable edge of being experts, sometimes the absolute authorities in their respective fields.
Integrity, while the coin of a free nation, is not a commodity found in markets; it is rarely earned more than once and its loss, by a poor bet against trust for exclusory gain, is destructive to the whole of one's character and usually unrecoverable. Rathergate, an attempt by CBS News to deceive the American electorate that was exposed by amateur commentators, bloggers and new media, will be remembered as the moment when progeny stood unmistakably taller than progenitor.
Or is the line direct? Like homo sapiens replaced homo erectus, perhaps anthropologists of the far-flung future will debate on how medius arrogans was evolutionarily superceded by medius popularis.