While one candidate this year has endlessly preached about “change,” the true and measurable change that politicos are seeing this season is a continuation of the death of old media. As newspapers and broadcast television continue to dwindle in readers and viewers the internet has continued to change the way society receives its news.

This is a positive development that just a decade ago would have seemed far fetched. In fact, many of us have yet to realize the harbinger of change that the new media represents. No longer are campaigns and voters forced to deal with a big three monopoly of networks that shape and control events into their ideological prism. With the internet virtually anyone can have an impact upon a campaign.

In 2004 three lawyers from Minnesota used their Powerlineblog.com site to expose Dan Rather and CBS’s untruthful hatchet job about President Bush’s military records. In 2006 a young staffer for Jim Webb’s campaign caught incumbent Sen. George Allen belittling him with a racist term and soon the video was seen everywhere via YouTube. Yes, the old walls of the media empire are coming down and we should celebrate.

One of the biggest reasons to herald the age of new media is that it has forced “mainstream” media to remove the mask they wore as “objective” reporters. Beginning in the 1950s the media began to slant increasingly towards left-wing candidates while pretending to be the font of all wisdom for the masses. It was not always thus.

In the beginning newspapers were often owned and controlled by politicians and political parties. That was even the case in early colonial days and was carried on by men such as Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin. Most cities had more than two papers and it was common for each party to have a paper that, if not owned by the party expressly, advocated for the party at every turn.

Powerful newsmen such as William Randolph Hearst and Col. Robert McCormick used their media empires to shape the world as they saw fit. In fact, McCormick’s staunch conservatism led him to blast FDR and the New Deal at every turn and the biased reporting at his Chicago Tribune helped create a headline which they wished for, but was famously wrong – Dewey Defeats Truman.

In 1940 Russell Davenport was the man who ran such magazines as Time, Life, and Fortune for the Henry Luce publications empire, and he used each as a vehicle to openly promote the candidacy of his man, Wendell Willkie, for the presidency. It was a better day for the press in such an era where biases and agendas were in the open and battle of ideas raged between them.

We are now seeing a return to such a time with Fox News and MSNBC staking out opposite sides of the political spectrum while the broadcast networks fade increasingly into irrelevance while still pretending to contain no bias.

The internet has allowed Americans to now pick and chose, ala carte style, when and where they will get their news. They can know instantly when something occurs and delve deeper into issues if they so desire. Their information is no longer limited to a 30-minute nightly newscast with 5-second sound bites and a smilingly fake big-haired teleprompter reader.

Increasingly voters know much more about politicians and their voting records, campaign contributors, scandals and so forth than ever before. While old cranks like Dan Rather might bemoan that fact, most Americans believe that knowledge is power and that they can filter it for themselves, thank you very much.

The shrewd campaigns are the ones that have embraced the new media. Those that chose to laugh off or ignore bloggers and social networking sites such as Facebook are the ones that will find themselves struggling to move their message and win votes. Ronald Reagan was viewed as the great communicator for his ability to go over the heads of the media and speak directly to the public via his radio addresses and speeches.

If he were running today I have little doubt that he would be riding the crest of the wave when it comes to the internet. He understood better than most politicians that the American public did not completely trust what had become an increasingly liberal media. No longer do we have to wait for Helen Thomas to ask a snarky question at a press conference and then write to us about the response.

We can view that press conference live on the internet if we so chose and form our own opinion. In the campaigns to come this trend toward the new media will only accelerate and future historians will be amazed that there was ever a time when just three television stations informed the masses. Where’s Dan Rather now?