I found this really insightful.
We like to say new media is allowing us all to be journalists. But it’s
probably more accurate to say it lets us all be anchors. Sure, the
Internet also allows people with local knowledge or serious expertise
to speak directly and be picked up by a wider audience, but it doesn’t
fundamentally do a whole lot to increase the population of those people.
And I love his proof point of Palin as the main example
That makes Palin the perfect post-postmodern politician, in a way: A
totally self-contained text, a signifier with no referent. You don’t
really need to know anything to love her or to hate her, because she’s not about
anything except… Sarah Palin. Obligingly, she places no demands on
either her supporters or her detractors, because what they decide to
think of her is all they need to know to decide what to think of her.
At the center of her media narrative is… the media’s narrative about
her, bouncing down an infinite corridor of mirrors. If Jorge Luis
Borges had a talk show on a cable channel run by M.C. Escher, it would
look like CNN right now. Welcome aboard the Goodship Palin, now sailing
from the desert of the real.