When Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed, started the Christian Coalition in 1987, their is no way they could have predicted the world wide web boom of the early nineties. If they had they would have done everything in their power to stop it, not because %90 of the web is porn, but because it has became the ultimate median for the free exchange of ideas, and put every verifiable lie, and fact, ever recorded, at the tip of your fingers.
The whole point of the Christian Coalition was to get religion interjected into politics, and government policy. Then to make a party of god, the coalition's choice was the republicans, and make them an over-whelming permanent majority. Then put god above all other authority in the country, and with people like Pat Robertson claiming to have a god hot line it would make them, the defacto god appointed rulers of the country, just like Iran, except with christianity. To pull this off was the Christian Coalition was going to need, a whole lot of money, and whole lot of support, but most importantly, they were going to need to tell a whole lot of lies.
This is where the Internet comes in, and the Christian Coalition, and other like them, hit a major stumbling block. Lies are now exposed in near real time, and the false witnesses that bear them immediately scrutinized. This leads to millions, of random, anonymous people, hyper-linking related information to the exposed lie. Showing it's origins, history, related lies, and the goal behind them. This whole process has been evolving over the last decade, and was at it's most ruthless, and visible in the 2008 elections. Hilary Clinton was exposed on her sniper fire lie. The McCain campaign was exposed as rove-politics-as-usual. Sarah Palin was exposed over, and over again, to be not only an idiot, but a dangerous idiot. As for Barack Obama nothing legitimate ever came to light, and stuck, so his opponents were reduced to egregious allegations, from his being a secret muslim, to his being the antichrist in living form. Even now the process is at work on the latest lie. As multiple sources point out the lobbyist connections to the town hall out rage events.
The internet effect has also reinforced journalism. While the quality of news media has most certainly gone down, the volume produced has skyrocketed. In a news paper format this would result in unexciting, but important news stories getting buried on page A6, continued on page A14, with an Ikea ad stuck right in the middle. In the case of cable, or evening news, such a story would get a blip on the scroller, and then be promptly forgotten. On the internet however their is no page A14, and the internet never forgets. Any piece of news that hits the web is destine to be read, reviewed, proven, or disproved, and ultimately hyper-linked to, and from, any remotely related story. Fark, and Digg are the best examples of this. In fact when it comes to obscure news Fark is often the first place it hits before major network news, as exposed by Drew Curtis, in his book, It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News. What all this means is a seemingly small, and unimportant story doesn't need to stand, or fall on it's own. It becomes part of a greater whole, and its legitimacy determined by where it fits in to that whole. Is it the final piece that connects many small stories in to a major whole story, or just more wharrgarbl. Thanks to the internet, news is no longer fact based solely on it's source. It has become more like a scientific hypothesis. A journalist, or even a blogger, puts a news story out on the web, and it becomes subject to unforgiving trail of review, research, and testing. Only after passing this pier review trial, does it become recognized as a quality theory, that rational people accept, and use to make decisions in their day to day lives.
End part 1
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