Verifiability

Even with the widespread integration of the Internet into daily lives, modern American society is still strongly rooted in the 20th century definition of mass media. Because television, radio, and newspapers were the top sources of information and news during the 1900s, “the economic structure was typified by high-cost hubs and cheap, ubiquitous, reception-only systems at the ends” (Benkler 179). This system has carried over into the age of the Internet.
Our society, even with the Internet, still relies on the media giants to provide true and verifiable news to the American people. Although the Foley scandal (a situation in which an unknown and mysterious blogger exposed a corrupt politician as a child molester) is an excellent example of the ability of people to manage their own news, the mass media corporations still provide the best coherent source of information.
Sites such as Google News are just aggregate sites, and they rely on real news sites to provide the information. When I open my Google home page, the top Google news reports always cite giant print or television media companies. Americans don't want to trust a random individual with a website; they want to trust a giant corporation with a reputation for truthful reporting.
But instead of being a source of news, what the Internet does change about mass media is the distribution of opinions. Ideas can be shared freely over the Internet. Benkler draws a parallel between this and small community meetings back when town meetings were feasible to discuss public opinion. He says that people can use the new forms of media for their communicative benefits – not to get information, but to share ideas. You can read about alternative courses of actions and propose your own. Not in thousands of years has an average citizen been able to interact so freely in open discussion with so many of their peers.
New digital media has so many benefits – widespread distribution, freedom from government control, and it draws from such a huge body of information. People are free to easily and cheaply distribute their opinions and their ideas to the masses over their blogs and message boards with no censorship from newspapers unwilling to publish editorials with radical opinions. But yet as the same time, it is plagued with the never ending drawback of verifiability. Without the solid backing of a reputable company behind news, the masses won't believe it. Not until the media picked up the story (and verified the story) of Foley's sex scandal was it believe by Americans. Mass media corporations will not fade as long as Americans really want the truth and not sensationalized blogging.