RSSWalter Mondale called it in the 1984 presidential debates. With results known to all.
I don’t have an opinion about Old China, but a small criticism of your argument here. One wouldn’t only count the number of winners of the Powerball lottery in order to measure its cultural significance in the US today. One would also pay attention to how many people bought tickets, stood in line, watched numbers being drawn, formed ticket buying cooperatives, etc.
I agree with you ES that complaints about the liberal media are usually silly, and always tiresome. My least favorite among the genre is ‘if Bush was doing X, the New York Times would be screaming bloody murder’ which tells me basically nothing: is X good, bad, going to work, likely to fail, illegal, immoral, what? Instead of X, you want to talk about the NYT, really? Or whether supporters of Obama are hypocrites? People engaging in either side of that discussion are getting exactly the media they deserve.
That said, Conor F’s explanations for how modern media falls short are mostly important points.
And, as a non-journalist, the notion that some guy writing on the internet is more reliable than a major media corporation isn’t shocking at all — provided the guy has integrity, some judgment, and the ability to look a little deeper, not to find a pre-set narrative, but the find out what is going on. Maybe 1% of people writing on the internet, but on any topic, you can usually find someone better than your average journalist.