Lots of neat discussion in the United States in the wake of last Sunday's column by Frank Rich in the New York Times. The piece was titled "Napster runs for president in 04". In it Rich says that Big Media -- the NY Times, the Washington Post, American network television -- just don't understand how Democratic hopeful Howard Dean's use of the Internet and an "interactive" campaign are changing the way politics works in the U.S. Rich writes: "It was not until F.D.R.'s fireside chats on radio in 1933 that a medium in mass use for years became a political force. J.F.K. did the same for television . . ." Dean, Rich suggests, is, like FDR and JFK, the first to really understand and use a new medium. But the beltway media are missing this point: "The condescending reaction to the Dean insurgency by television's political correspondents can be reminiscent of that hilarious party scene in the movie "Singin' in the Rain," where Hollywood's silent-era elite greets the advent of talkies with dismissive bafflement. "The Internet has yet to mature as a political tool," intoned Carl Cameron of Fox News last summer as he reported that the runner-up group to Dean supporters on the meetup.com site was witches . ." Jay Rosen, chair of the journalism program at New York University, reconstructs Rich's essay and provides some commentary of his own: "If it's true the press plays a vetting role in the campaign, then it must be true that the press is a player. Or to put it another way, political journalists have come to understand themselves as supplier of a service--vetting the field--that the body politic cannot handle itself, because of high information costs and low motivation to bear them. "Too many choices, too much information to present." But what happens when these costs shift, and new motivations spring up? Suddenly the supplier may be supplying something that people can make for themselves, or no longer want from that source-- like, say, political proctology via the pens of Washington journalists. . ." The San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor sounds a bit pessimistic that things will get better before they get worse. "What worries me most right now is that political journalists are even failing even in their gatekeeper/megaphone role. It beggars the imagination -- hell, it terrifies me -- that a majority of the American public still believes that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi and that Saddam somehow had a key role in this."