blogger, and newspaper publisher Stephen Waters takes my list, moves the sentences around, adds a few phrases and comes out with a story . Then Waters creates a chart attempting to show what causes what. The Net explosion is changing the relationship between people and news. It has caused bloggers to have a role in politics and a significant effect on the press. Distributed knowledge has enabled both amateur and professional bloggers, blurring brand. The effect is to enable real-time checking of main stream media, which journalism is only just beginning to appreciate. Scandals exposed by online real-time checking, exacerbated by the media's reluctance to concede the points, has caused brand erosion. This, in turn, has made readers and viewers wonder if there ever was a neutral observer and a disinterested account. At samizdata.net , Brian Micklethwait, writing from London, responds to my list and to Stephen Waters: The mainstream media, he says, "are the practitioners of a skill that has now become superfluous. Their stock in trade is wrapping up whatever is their preferred personal/global agenda in the language of National Common Sense. (Hence the National Common Sense suits and hairpieces and voices.) But such wrapping is now waste and nonsense. Nobody needs it any more, or responds to it any more, with other than derision..." The entertainer is the pivot here because I think part of the new -- but transient -- narrative is that "The media are the last to know"...and in particular, the last to know