Back in 1992 I was part of a group that set out to change the way the media worked. You are currently using the result - its called the World Wide Web.

The fact that politics played a major part in the design and deployment of the Web has been pretty much ignored by every media pundit since. Everyone assumed that we were just a bunch of pointy headed geeks who didn't really understand the full implications of what we were doing. And those of us who knew exactly what we were trying to do were certainly in no hurry to make our intentions known.

The first thing I did when I returned from meeting Tim Berners-Lee at the Annecy conference where the Web was first shown in public was to tell the people running the Clinton-Gore '92 campaign about it. You think that Dean invented online campaigning? Not true, take a look in the Google News archives of Usenet from '92 and you will find the press releases that the team at the MIT AI lab were sending out for the Clinton, Perot and Green campaigns.

Most net users would say that the US 'mainstream' media has become much worse over the past ten years. I say nonsense.

In the first place, stop talking about the 'mainstream' media as if the Web is a minor player. Today the Web is just as mainstream as cable or network TV. Its not the scope of the media that is the issue, it is who they answer to. The term 'establishment media' is far more accurate. Fox News is no more accurate when it is online rather than on TV.

The Establishment media has not become any worse over the past ten years. The change that has happened is that we are much more aware of how bad it has always been.

In particular the headline that caused me to see the need to break the power of the establishement media was 'It was the Sun what won it' in Murdoch's London paper after the Tory party was re-elected in the spring of 1992. True or not, it was a plausible claim. Murdoch is not a UK citizen and clearly puts his own interests before those of the UK so why should we allow him to choose our government?

Murdoch won the '92 campaign for the Tories using the same tactics that it is generally believed Karl Rove invented: smears, lies and innuendo endlessly repeated, a one man echo chamber.

The idea we had in '92 was not to replace the established media, the Internet was far too small for that to be possible, a computer capable of running a decent Web browser cost in excess of $5,000 and there were no public ISPs. We didn;t think we could replace the establishment media but we could introduce a feedback loop so that the lies and distortions would be exposed.

So now 16 years later the Associated Press greets their faovrite candidate with donuts with sprinkles, gives fawning coverage and then proceeds to ambush his opponent.

Did we fail? I don't think so. In the post Web media landscape there is room for every type of media outlet from partisan to independent. But what there is no room for is media outlets that sell themselves on their independence while being covertly partisan.

Fox News makes no real secret of their partisan leanings, they only deny them as yet another way to annoy liberals. They can survive on partisan coverage for as long as their ratings hold. But AP sell themselves to newspapers as providing an unbiased view. The fact that their reporters deliver coverage with sprinkles for their favorite canidate McCain has been noted and that will damage the AP brand going forward.