MSM a misnomer

Over at CJR Daily, the blog of the Columbia Journalism Review, Steve Lovelady argues persuasively that "mainstream media" is a misleading term -- at least as it's used by disparaging bloggers:

But in an age when overall newspaper circulation has been inexorably leaking away year after year for more than 20 years now; when the major network news operations draw barely 50 percent of the nightly audience they once had; and when general interest magazines have been elbowed aside by niche publications, the tag "mainstream" to describe a bunch of bewildered guys 'n dolls who find themselves slipping daily down the razor blade of life seems not just quaint, but missing the point entirely.

We prefer the more accurate term Corporate Media, or CM, since paradoxically many of these floundering outfits are owned by monster corporations whose senior executives must wonder, as they stare at the ceiling at 3 o'clock in the morning, "What was I thinking?" (See Consolidation, Media.)

Instead, Lovelady proposes that "mainstream media" is more suitable as a "dead-on description" of something quite different:

The avidly partisan right-wing press, represented in the swelling blogosphere, the small-magazine world, radio networks such as Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel, newspapers such as the Washington Times and the New York Post and, perhaps most importantly, any number of cable television outlets. ... Obviously, there's some overlap. Fox News, for example, is both Corporate Media and the MSM -- the most potent blend of all.