Keith Olbermann has been fired from MSNBC. And media continues on. I’m most fascinated by the fact that this is TOP NEWS around the country, getting the kind of coverage that was once only called for if someone landed on the moon. Of course, media outlets (USA Today, AP, The Parkersburg Chronicle & Shopper) care a great deal when someone in the biz gets the boot. I understand. However, I’m not in the news business and I want to read about actual news.

As newspapers get the boot, which we rightly hear about through media outlets, the single most important question remains: which medium has credibility? Newspapers went to print and couldn’t really take their words back once they were spread, so there existed a sort of built-in accountability that had as its consequence a loss of trust by the reading public. Today, print is alive, breathing along with everything else on the internet, easily morphing to the adjusted story with the updated facts, often without acknowledgment of yesterday’s erroneous report.
Unless you take the time to go to http://www.archive.org, there’s little chance you’ll ever see the questionable report. Unless other media outlets pick it up, in which it becomes less about facts for the general public and more about making Fox News/CNN/MSNBC look bad, so that you’ll side with the trustworthy other guys from here on out. And if you side with only one media outlet that lives on side A, it’s quite difficult to think about side B since you don’t ever hear it on that network.