Today's big stink is centered around a 4 minute piece on The Today Show [1], produced by Matt Lauer. Take a look [2] :

(If you are using Internet Explorer, this clip may not show. Please click here to open in another window [3]. 'Tis another reason to switch to Firefox [4].)

In many of my presentations about blogging I have made the point that right now we are in the middle of a semantic warfare and that Google and blogs are the tools of semantic guerrilla warriors like me.

Here's the deal : Big Media was the tool of the powerful. When people talk about "Top-Down Politics" or hierarchical politics, it really doesn't start in Washington DC. Top-Down politics starts in New York City addresses like One Rockefeller Plaza [5] and 229 West 43rd Street [6].

The magazines, TV shows and advertisments produced over at Madison Avenue, 6th Avenue (or Avenue of the Americas) and 10th and 11th Avenues have only one purpose : To influence "the demographics". It isn't a coincidence that politicos and advertisers use the same term to describe "the people" who end up shopping with their votes and voting with their wallets. The delusion is that Power in the United States is purveyed only by those who have control over what "the demographics" read, listen, wear, eat, like.

If you control desire/information/knowledge, the maxim used to go, then you control Power. So how are we to understand Matt Lauer's move?

Howard Kurtz on the linguistic missile [7] :

I'm still working on the part where NBC gets more power if the conflict is viewed as a civil war. Because the network would be seen as galvanizing support for a pullout? All because of the use of the C-word? Is American support for the war so shaky that a single network's phraseology can cause that support to crumble?

[...]

I have no problem in using the phrase. But I don't think every news outlet needs to have an edict from on high.

I continue to believe that the day-to-day coverage of the carnage in Iraq is more important in terms of swaying public opinion than the label that the MSM chooses to slap on the conflict. Did most people think this wasn't a civil war before Lauer et al made the switch? I don't think so.

Had this been 1996, Dan Rather would have probably been declaring the new linguistic edict for all media outlets to follow. Yet this is 2006, it's Matt Lauer doing the pronouncements on a show that is considered the people's show.

Top-Down media rhetoric? "We consulted with a lot of people" Lauer says in this clip to Gen. McCaffrey. "A lot of people" could have been experts, could have been consultants but also could have been "the people" as well. Yet acknowledging they had consulted a lot of people, as opposed to saying this was a decision of their editorial board, is probably one of those pivotal moments in Big Media history. For Big Media, "a lot of people" is increasingly more important than "the Board". And that is a historic shift in and of itself.

Who are we to blame or thanks?

Blogs?

Reality-TV?

American Idol?

You decide.