Blame the media. They’re all conspiring against you. Or them. Or us. I don’t know. Friends of mine will tell you that my first major cardiac event will likely stem from listening to a conversation themed thusly.

Sometimes, bloggers are pretty worked up over media consolidation and how the MSM — mainstream media — is too centralized, too powerful. Lots of antitrust overtones. Somewhat startlingly, Jeff Jarvis, who is a vocal opponent of the MSM status quo, wrote this a couple of weeks ago and I just got around to reading it:

Media consolidation is a boogeyman we don’t need to be afraid of anymore. Clear Channel, the great consolidator, had to go private because the market wouldn’t support it anymore. Tribune Company, the wunderkind of cross-ownership with a paper, TV, radio, online, and a sports franchise in the Chicago market, has been taken over by a builder. Giant Knight Ridder fell into the hands of giant McClatchy, which just took a huge write-off against its plummeting value. Consolidation today is no longer about conquering the world. It is, as I’ve said here often, about huddling together against the cold wind of the internet. Let them huddle, I say, or they’ll die sooner.

I disagree.

More voices, more voices, more voices. The Internet is swell for getting a multitude of perspectives, but there are a lot of people who simply don’t want to (or don’t have the time or means to) go searching out a diversity of sources. They have to rely on television on print. Or they choose to. Or in some cases, such as my own, they supplement their Internet findings with print publications.

Why surrender media of any kind to consolidation like this? I don’t think it does much to preserve the voices, especially since all of it just encourages that instinct to cut back to a bare-bones reporting team — how long, for example, before someone is the only capitol reporter for a city’s major newspaper, television station and radio station combined? — and prop the majority of the publication up on wire services?

Gross.

And that’s coming from somebody who doesn’t think The Media Is Against Us.