Jules Crittenden » Apocalypse Now
Sounds great. Unencumbered by anything resembling accountability, direct knowledge of anything being reported on, and eventually, any actual reporting experience, too. What Hirschorn is describing sounds more like a post-apocalyptic feral scene that would be even more rife with fraud, poorly disguised bias and shoddy reporting, relying on even less reliable sources of information, than what we have now. Starring Green Helmet Guy. It would also go over like Waterworld. Hate the media? Wait till you see what no media is like. None of those powerful freestanding monoliths that everyone loves to hate, just a vast crowd of squeaky-voiced, shallow-pocketed websites, any one of which can be sued into silence or oblivion in minutes. It would end up looking a lot like Russia, I’d guess, speaking of feral post-apocalyptic media-challenged environments.
Well, maybe.
I think somewhere in here needs to be asked a simple question: What constitutes news reporting?
Try this thought experiment: An event occurs, and you are there to watch it, hear it, feel, taste, smell it, and draw your own conclusions. Would you trust that “news experience” more than a newpaperman’s report of it?
We are moving in the general direction of affording people that sort of access to events. I have been fascinated by the recent police shooting of a young man at the local Fruitvale Bart Station. Apparently the thing was caught on half-a-dozen to a dozen different cellphone videos. Some of them are of horrible quality. Some are not. All are instructive. And the vast bulk of local reporting has been based on what was caught on those cellphone cameras - none of whom were wielded by journalists, or even bloggers. Just ordinary folks armed with the capabilities once entirely reserved to big tv trucks owned and manned by rich tv stations.
That’s one aspect: the “you are there” part of accessing the news. That is only going to increase in the ever-more-wired world.
But what about analysis? This is what the blogosphere excels in, actually, and it does an infinitely better job at it than “trained journalists” do. In the vast majority of cases, journalists are trained in journalism, and are entirely ignorant of broad swathes of human knowledge and experience. No “trained reporter” caught the obvious problems with Dan Rather’s phony transcripts. But somebody with technical knowledge - Charles Johnson - not only picked it up in seconds, but created a famously damning graphic that made the phoniness instantly apparent even to absolute amateurs.
Jules worries that tiny blog sites can be “sued into silence or oblivion” with ridiculous ease. Well, maybe one can. Or even a dozen. But recent history has shown that lawsuits are not only worthless when dealing with network effects, they actually are counterproductive. I can’t remember how many times I have linked to, or posted about, the work of some obscure site that is being threatened with a lawsuit over something that appeared at that site. The blogosphere instinctively understand that this is our real protection: Try to shut one of us down, and tomorrow a thousand of us will be re-broadcasting exactly what set off the censorship effort in the first place.
Finally, there is the investigative aspect of journalism. Well, what is that, exactly? It is the attempt to ferret out secrets. But nothing is truly secret. Somebody knows about it. Now, here’s a truth - if the secret is so well kept that nobody outside the circle of secret keepers knows about it, a journalist isn’t going to unravel it either. Because the only way a journo can accomplish the unraveling is to get somebody to talk to him, to provide evidence of some sort, or otherwise expose the secret.
Those doing the exposing now have access to a nearly infinite number of outlets. Imagine if the Nixonian “Deep Throat” could have gone direct to Drudge - or YouTube.
It is natural for those men and women raised and trained in the old order of journalism to regard their experience, training, and expertise as being essential to the process of an informed public. But that doesn’t mean they are correct, it merely means they are human.
But that won’t do anything to slow the advance of the Know Everything culture, and the destruction of the old order.
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I think he’s wrong. There will always be room for “real” journalism — just not at the New York Times. He’s also wrong about the lack of “informed” reporting. The opposite will occur; there will be *more* informed reporting.
The difference, I think, is that it will tend to occur in niche publications rather than general ones. The internet has not put the New England Journal of Medicine out of business. And it won’t put the American Spectator or Mother Jones out, either. Those folk will publish “real” stories — within their niches.
And it won’t leave us without experts, either. A New York Times journalist with a degree in English Lit is not, in fact, the most knowledgeable person about medicine, and a physician blogger — or a physician writing for a magazine — will do a better job. The idea that the journalist, because of his or her experience in writing who, what, when, where, and how in the general sense, has a better grasp of the issues than an expert in a given subject is simple arrogance. It takes a certain kind of attitude to consider an expert writing about his or her area of expertise “apocalyptic” and “feral.”
There isn’t a hell of a lot to the supposed expertise of journalists. Here it is:
As to pyramidal construction, it applies only in the dead-tree world, where articles must be cut to fit the available space in the layout and editors don’t want to be bothered with reading and understanding the material they’re cutting. As to neutral and complete reporting, I can attest this was the critical central point of the curriculum for aspiring journalists — at least, it was two decades ago, when I was doing that kind of thing — but the “profession” itself was already in process of jettisoning it, and has since completed the task, so the only reason I kept it on this list is for completeness. Not that I’ve looked lately, but if I had to guess, I’d say the schools are still teaching it, but that it is increasingly pro forma (see the last point), it being a hard point to insist upon when anyone who opens a newspaper can see the reality, and that those few idealistic students that still take it seriously get a hellacious shock when they take their fresh-minted credentials out into the job market. As to a practical understanding of libel law, there’s not much to it (”when in doubt, say ‘alleged’”), especially in the wake of New York Times v. Sullivan. There are some nuances relating to those who are not public figures, but somehow I don’t think that’s what Crittenden is complaining about here. As to giving offense, I’ve never noticed reluctance being a problem on the internet. As to digging, this has been jettisoned for the most part as well, the “profession” preferring to reprint press releases, and the Blogosphere is a hell of a lot better at digging anyway. As to semi-plausible deniability of bias (provided you don’t mind the occasional horse laugh), we’re better off without it.
Let’s see, what does that leave?