I have family and friends who laugh at me for wanting a blog. They've read blogs, they tell me, and it's all just silliness or partisan nonsense. They prefer REAL news and trustworthy reportage.
And I ask, plaintively, "Where on Earth do you intend to find that?"
There has been a great deal of naval-gazing done by bloggers recently on What Bloggers Are and Aren't as opposed to What Journalists Are and Aren't. I've been both. And while I'd love to just give you my deathless thoughts on the matter, after a few months of this long self-absorbtion by the "blogverse", one of my favorite blogs took up the subject and did a better job of explaining it than I'll ever do.
So my recommendation? Go to Emphasis Added and read this essay, please.
I would like to point out the following few 'graphs, however, for those of you who don't like to read long essays by people you may not know, because I think they say something we need to hear before we become "consumers" of a very bad product -- namely news as currently perpetrated by our mainstream media.
Whereas the mid-20th century media organs may have been arrogant and monopolistic, they were at least genuinely authoritative. They had standards, they spoke for someone, and they cared about getting basic facts right and having a coherent point of view. Today’s media is peddling the remnants of its authority to add the patina of respectability to transparently self-serving propaganda. They still have the arrogance, the presumption of importance attached to their views, but the craft has fallen away and the ethics are a joke.
It’s the gap between what the media should be and what it actually is that has brought about the blogger revolution. The reasons are simple. Media outlets are, and always have been, creatures of commerce. Back in the old monopoly days when the entry costs were high and not everyone could start a newspaper or a TV network, there was plenty of money to be made and journalists could afford their ethics. The lack of competition paradoxically meant that those few actors in the market were going after the entire audience, not just some segment of it. The bias was toward the mainstream. It didn’t pay for networks to box themselves in catering to narrow ideological constituencies or exposing themselves to ridicule with lax standards. Publishers got behind the whole earnest code of conduct we associate with journalists because it helped give their product credibility in the market.
As new technologies and new business models changed the playing field, the competition became more intense. Media outlets compromised in all kinds of ways to gain or retain their audience. They were no longer in a position to hold to lofty standards if the readers demanded sensationalism and bias. Increased competition led to segmentation, where media outlets sought the intense loyalty of narrow market groups instead of a mass audience. These narrow groups don’t want to be challenged, and they don’t care about objectivity. Once it became clear that a bad product would sell as well or better than a good one, standards began a race to the bottom.
But, as some friends and notorious family members would say, what's the problem? A free market will do what it will, even allow a "race to the bottom" if it seems warrented. Why the fuss?
The following makes as good a case as I ever could:
If this were only about selling socks and mattresses, it wouldn’t make any difference. But the press plays an important social role in a democracy. For citizens to make meaningful decisions about self-government, they need to be informed. Everyone needs to have the same basic set of facts in front of them so they can evaluate competing arguments and visions on an apples-to-apples basis. Without an objective and authoritative media to provide this master narrative, discourse dissolves into a bunch of silo’d realities where every separate media audience has their own narrow view of the world, reinforced by a press that tells them only what they want to hear. That’s a recipe for the disintegration of civil society – a path many think we’re already pretty far along.
So we have this tension between a legitimately important institution on one hand and the usual capitalist imperative to maximize profits on the other. And the fact is, there is no necessary connection between good journalism and the things a media outlet needs to do to make money. It’s not even really a question. Private companies are responsible to their shareholders, not the public. Journalists can get degrees from graduate schools, form trade organizations, and talk till they’re blue in the face about their profession and their importance, but at the end of the day, the ones who take a corporate paycheck are employees of giant institutions whose actual responsibility to serve the public interest simply doesn’t exist.
The thing that worries me is that the vast majority of people don't realize, or understand what is really at stake in this situation. The American Revolution, that thing we're all so proud of, came about because of a form of "citizen blogger". Pamphlets and broadsides helped spread the message of independence to the general population. Thomas Pain's Common Sense helped make a persuasive argument in favor of something many at the time were calling simple treason. This country might not have been what it became if it weren't for people taking up their pens and making a case for what they believed.
There were, of course, legitimate press outlets back then (Benjamin Franklin, for instance, owned one of them). And many helped the cause of independence. But privately published pamphlets, leaflets and other printed materials spread the message even farther than the professionally created newspapers did.
I wonder if the "professional media" of that day and age felt as threatened by pamphleteers and other writers as the mainstream media seems to be by bloggers?
I think, honestly, that eventually blogs, like this one, humble and pathetic though it may be, could well be subsumed by whatever the "mainstream media" turns into in the years to come. I think "professional bloggers" will eventually emerge, with some professional code of ethics and/or standards, and a scale of payment somewhere just below a fry cook at McDonald's (history laughs at those who think writers are all weathy middle-class types).
But for now, I'll take what I can find online as an alternative to what passes for journalism these days. It's not perfect, but it's better than just being lied to and expected to roll over and ask for more.
8:25:20 PM 
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