A few weeks back, Markos kicked off a debate on Daily Kos by suggesting that it would be appropriate to come up with a description of the mainstream media that all progressives could get behind. There are multiple reasons for not liking “MSM”, not the least of which is that the right wing blogosphere long ago co-opted the term “MSM”, and has equated the term with “liberal media”. Diarists and commenters on Daily Kos have settled on the term “traditional media”.

Bleah.

Let me start by stating right up front that I’m not a linguist. But the word “traditional” is a bit ivory-towerish. Using this adjective in terms of describing information delivery confers two impressions:

1) A certain trust factor in the vehicles of delivery, both print and broadcast. I don’t think many of us have a great deal of trust remaining in the 4th estate’s ability to objectively deliver information.

2) By implication, the “new media” (ie. blogs, podcasting, and other internet news outlets) is to be less than trusted. If the pontificators in the ivory towers are “traditional”, what does that make venues like Daily Kos, TPM. or AlterNet? Untraditional - and suspect and untrustworthy.

Here’s my proposition. By way of background, I’m a bit of a computer geek and ersatz historian of technology. I cut my programming teeth back in college using Hollerith cards that I had to process in the university computer center after midnight (the only time that students could get in to run their jobs). I’ve migrated old IBM mainframe systems to AS400, seen Tandem Non-Stop come and go, owned one of the first VIC-20’s, and participated in 3 SAP implementations. The common thread in all of this?

Deprecating legacy systems as new technology became available. In the information systems world, the word “legacy” implies outdated and inefficient hardware and processes to deliver data. And that’s the place where I think the U.S. media resides.

In describing the media, I don’t think that anyone wants to imply that the information points they provide us (the data, if you will) is, by default, incorrect or faulty. Taking in news in the information age that we’re in is like drinking from a fire hose. There’s just so much information, and too little time for reporters and editors to properly distill and analyze the raw information (for the most part). By the time that a true commentator or analyst has actually looked at the data points and drawn some supportable conclusions, everyone else in the world has moved on, because information continues to flow in a torrent.

So, if I use the term “legacy media”, it’s not really a derogatory or dismissive term. It’s describing a media that, by it’s own admission and financial results, is losing ground rapidly to our own ability to distill and interpret raw information (such as we do daily, here on ASZ and other internet venues). But “legacy” also implies that there was (and is) value in both the methodologies and processes that bring us the information.

In fact, the “new media” morphed from the “legacy media”, as surely as I moved from Hollerith cards and 10,000 square-foot mainframe rooms to a a multi-gigahertz notebook PC (with nearly a terrabyte of information storage space) that fits in a small bag.

Plus, I just think that “legacy media” has a really nice ring to it, whereas “traditional media” is kinda clunky.

Thoughts?