Old media at Davos: "We owned the news. We were the gate keepers. And we very much owned the facts as well."

The quote comes from Emma Tucker the editor of The Wall Street Journal

Wow. OK.

Considering all of the legacy media outlets out there The Wall Street Journal is one that we feel actually does a good job generally. It is certainly not the first of the old publications we would take to task. We read The Journal often and we enjoy it. We include the entire discussion entitled: “Defending Truth” HERE. There’s some good stuff in the discussion.

But the above quote is quite telling.

It is unclear as Ms. Tucker speaks whether she is sad that the old media are no longer the gate keepers or whether she is really taking the emergence of the informed everyday person and new news to heart. We sense that she’s somewhere in the middle.

On the whole the emergence of new news is absolutely a positive. The world is a much better place for having outlets like Substack, and Rumble, and X. Now people can actually see whether or not what they are being told is true is indeed true. The old media can now be “fact checked” and frankly many in the old media do not care for it.

We have written in the past about the emergence of the “internet informed citizenry” (IIC). We argued that just as the printing press disrupted the old order (as people became literate) so too has the Internet upset the order that existed before it.

The new news really got going with the emergence of social media. I can remember watching videos of Ron Paul in 2007 discussing the Federal Reserve and the Iraq war on the floor of The House and thinking “Man, I would never have seen this if it wasn’t for the Internet”. What Doctor Paul was talking about was too controversial. It was too complicated for CNN or Fox. He was only a Congressman from Texas.

In a short period of time however, thanks to the Internet and hundreds of thousands of seekers on their computers, Ron Paul would quickly rise to become one of the most consequential politicians of our lifetimes. No Internet, no Ron Paul. No Internet, no TEA Party. No Internet, no Wikileaks and Julian Assange. No Internet, no Snowden revelations. No Internet, no exposure of how Hillary gamed the primaries to “defeat” Bernie Sanders. No Internet, probably no Trump. No Internet, no Brexit.