In the latest edition of City Journal, Adam Thierer writes that this is "America’s Golden Age of Media"--and it could all be over soon:

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press’s advent, information spread at a snail’s pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society—or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon.

While the far left seems bent on knocking out talk radio because they can't otherwise establish a foothold there, it's worth noting that Democrats didn't need the medium to retake Congress in November.

Beyond radio, call me a Pollyanna, but I can't help but think it's going to be awfully difficult putting the genie back in the bottle. There are now RSS feeds to shape content and blogs and podcasts to publish it. (Technorati was tracking 60 million blogs last time I checked, a mammoth growth from about seven million blogs when I wrote this piece in 2004 for TCS.)

As I wrote last week:

In one sense, the current hyperventilating by Imus, Rosie, Sharpton, et al represent the death rumbles of an eighty year old mass electronic media in an era when everyone will eventually have his own blog--and heck, if they want it bad enough, their own TV station.

Napster in its original form was killed by the recording industry at the start of the 21st century, but the concept of file sharing and downloading individual tracks of music is the law of the land. Similarly, YouTube has demonstrated how millions want to get their TV.

It's certainly a far cry from the days when mass media meant three TV networks and one or two monolithic (usually institutionally liberal--and arguably worse, deadly dull) newspapers per city.

One downside to today's media cornucopia though: is our readers learning?