The New Yorker published a great article on Non-Stop News by Ken Auletta; "with cable, the web, and tweets, can the President - or the press - still control the story?"  And the answer is ... no.

While that is true, an interesting aspect of this is the asymmetry between the blogorati and the man on the street.  For those of us like us, we have cable, we read blogs, we receive tweets, etc. and the story is a mosaic; we can triangulate "truth" by integrating across tens or hundreds of sources.  But for the average Joe not much has changed; the President's message is still his message, delivered through the MSM, and the MSM's spin still frames the story.

I see this clearly in my discussions with my Mom.  She is intelligent, well-informed, and engaged, but gets her news primarily from the MSM, filtered by friends who get their news primarily from the MSM.  Her view of an issue is often quite different to mine.  She still thinks Al Gore is right :)