In a panel discussion Monday afternoon, Hollywood filmmakers and Internet bloggers were on the offensive, and the news media was their target.

    In the face of corporate consolidation and the race for ratings and subscription numbers, the question was whether the media is abandoning its job while movies and alternative media were taking up the slack.

    News gathering by mainstream papers and networks is changing, argued the panelists, who included filmmaker Stephen Gaghan ("Syriana"), Vanity Fair National Editor Todd Purdum and Time magazine's Matt Cooper, who nearly was indicted for not revealing his source in the Valerie Plame case.

    "You have to remember that the media is in a number of simultaneous crises, any of which can destroy the meaning of the traditional media function," said Eric Alterman, author and blogger for MSNBC.com.

    Those crises include the trend toward tabloid stories, an obsession with celebrity news, the corporate ownership of news outlets, and falling revenues of newspapers and TV news divisions, he said.

    "The people put in charge of these media companies are not journalists," Alterman said. "They don't fight back. And so the Bush administration has been able to get away with a tremendous amount of abuse."

    But with the advent of the Internet and personal journalism, readers and TV viewers have been turning to the Web or to movies like "Fahrenheit 9/11" to fill their appetite for news.

    "The blogosphere . . .can make every man a king, every person a publisher," said Purdum, who used to be a national correspondent for the New York Times. "We are in some tectonic plate shift. It will never be the way it was."


    - Vince Horiuchi