Is it just me, or are the media wars heating up? Most recently, an interview with Andrew Keen on NPR, author of “The Cult of the Amatuer: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.”

How about this jewel in Sunday’s AJC:

Web 2.0, the term applied to a new generation of sites that encourage interaction and collaboration, will degrade us all, warns a former president of the American Library Association. In a provocative essay last week on Britannica Blog called “Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason,” Michael Gorman foresees a “world in which everyone is an expert in a world devoid of expertise.” He calls 2.0 an “unholy brew made up of the digital utopianism that hailed the Internet as the second coming of Haight-Ashbury — everyone’s tripping, and it’s all free.” One commenter points out that Gorman uses a Web 2.0 platform (a blog) to mount his assault on Web 2.0.

Bloggers will scream that MSM outlets just “don’t get it” (the adolescent argument). MSM outlets scream that bloggers are unprofessional (the strawman).

But what’s the big picture? These media wars are pointless because each side recognizes the fault of the other, but not their own. In the long run, new media may make old media more honest — or not. Or, maybe new media and old media will make one another more honest, but only sometimes.

But as long as there’s going to be a bunch of arguing about experts vs. crowds, for right now, the crowds appear to be winning. And the crowds are winning simply because they’re not going to go away.

So, here’s a topic for discussion:

We are moving from an era where experts are trusted too much and crowds too little, to an era where crowds are trusted too much and experts too little.