Jim Lehrer sticks up for traditional media while Michael Moore praises Crooks and Liars.

And congrats to Crooks and Liars website!

Thinkprogress:

In an address at the University of Texas last night, PBS Newshour host Jim Lehrer warned against “spicing up” the news. “You want to be entertained? Go to the circus, please. Do not watch ‘The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,’” he said. Lehrer added, while increasing numbers of Americans are going online for their news, he’s not worried about the future of traditional media:

“The bloggers are talkers, commentators, not reporters. The talk-show hosts are reactors, commentators, not reporters,” Lehrer said. “The search engines can search but do not report. All of them, every single one of them, have to have the news in order to exist and thrive.”

Michael Moore thinks the opposite. From Crooks and Liars:

Arlen Parsa sent this audio in: “Michael Moore (who will be on Countdown Tuesday at 8PM ET) did a fundraiser interview for the progressive indy station KVMR (kvmr.org) in California last week. He mentioned C&L as a great alternative media site.”

Moore: “Once people do have information, once their enlightened, and sometimes that has to start out with a Dixie Chick up on stage saying ‘I don’t believe what we’re being told,’ or ‘I don’t support the president of the United States in this’… That’s the way change occurs… bit by bit, somebody tuned in while they were driving along. You know? Somebody goes down I-80, happened upon this Amy Goodman show.

Or somebody picked up The Nation, or In These Times, or somebody on the Internet came across Crooks & Liars, or any of a number of other sites, and slowly– and this is the good thing about people–because they are now armed wit the information they begin to say ‘hey, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, what? huh?’ and before long that 70% that was [for] the war becomes 70% that are against the war and 70% against Mr Bush.”