Lamestream media's lack of comparable coverage for the Manning trial.

That's how they earn the term "lamestream media."

Jul 31, 2013 - Did the media drop the ball on the Bradley Manning trial?

Corporate or government-led corporate media knew they could not get as many rubes interested in the Manning trial as with other trials that were much more irrelevant.

Obviously, the media needs to make money, and other court cases and events were deemed bigger moneymakers.

“The corporate media coverage of this trial, which is arguably one of the most important cases in modern American history, has been utterly shameful,” Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill said on “Democracy Now!” Tuesday after U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was found guilty of 20 charges related to his leaks of classified information to WikiLeaks.

“This is the state of media in this country right now, and it is just devastating that we don’t have a media culture that says this should have been gavel-to-gavel coverage,” Scahill said.

“Only a few American news organizations (one is the Guardian’s US edition) bothered to staff the Manning trial in any serious way,” Dan Gillmor writes. “Independent journalists did most of the work, and did it as well as it could be done under the circumstances.”

“I’ve developed a complete disdain for the mainstream media,” the independent journalist Alexa O’Brien told We Are Change. “It’s really important that people of good conscience, citizens, come to the fore and do the things that the press are not doing.”

“One can start getting into an argument about whether the Zimmerman trial” or other high-profile cases “deserve the level of coverage they get,” Politico reporter Josh Gerstein told Poynter by phone. “In that respect, I would probably agree with the criticism.”

The military’s arrangements for the press “have been kind of complicated and annoying,” Gerstein said. You couldn’t file from the courtroom, the Internet connection was dicey and you had to have an escort from the gates. (Reporters there had many complaints about harassment.) Gerstein began attending the trial as a member of the public, he said, to minimize hassle.

“I think mainstream media coverage of the trial has been patchy, certainly. when you compare with Bulger trial, or Trayvon Martin, or other criminal trials that have caught the imagination,” Ed Pilkington, who covered the trial for the Guardian, wrote in an email, which I’ve edited lightly for style. “I can understand why that is — this is a complicated trial about technical issues. But I do think the serious news outlets have missed the story here — the very serious implications of such a massive ramping up of the treatment of whistleblowers and official leakers as today’s verdict has demonstrated.”

“I think what has happened is that you’ve had a very healthy spawning of Web-based journalism such as Alexa and Kevin, and that has helped to fill in some of the holes left by the insufficiences of the main news outlets,” Pilkington wrote.

"... healthy spawning of Web-based journalism ..."

As it should be. Good. As more people consume their news over mobile devices, then maybe more people will have more knowledge about important issues like the Manning trial instead of irrelevant mind control stories by the lamestream media and government, such as the Martin-Zimmerman trial.

So instead of complaining about the lack of coverage by corporate (government) media, we should praise the Web coverage by independents. The former will continue to lose relevance while the latter continues to grow in importance. That's progressing.

Aug 1, 2013 story: U.S. Adults Now Spending More Time on Digital Devices Than Watching TV

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