So it seems that not a week goes by without another alarming think piece fretting over the sad state of newspapers today, and our sad future should newspapers go the way of Lehman Brothers or the walkman. (Let me warm you up with one from Time magazine from early February, in which Walter Isaacson proposes an iTunes-esque micropayment system for individual bits of news content.)
As a service to you, my darling readers, I'm starting this recurring feature, where I'll present some of the better pieces that tackle the future of journalism. I've got a dog in this race, guys, so you can at least count on me having actually thought critically about this stuff.
(And in case you're wondering about the title of this particular recurring feature, since I don't often explain these things [you guys know that "Zelda Warriors" are links, right? You know, like the hero from the Zelda Nintendo games?] allow me. When I was the news editor at the Heights, the independent student newspaper of Boston College, I used to have a little catchphrase: you can't spell "newspaper" without "news." It was a way of making my section seem more appealing, compared to the glitzier sports and features section. As you'll come to see, that phrase more or less sums up my view of the newspaper industry.)
Anyway, this installment is about a piece that appeared on the New Republic's website, by Yochai Benkler. It's a response to an earlier story speculating that the decline of newspapers would result in a proliferation of corruption by our politicians. Benkler refutes this premise, and lays out a sensible vision for the future of journalism, one where we get our reporting from a melange of different forms, ranging from traditional newspaper operations, to TPM-like online outfits, to motivated individual citizens. Money quote:
But policy interventions, if any, need to be designed for this networked environment of diverse models of news production. More important than a national fund to assure the continued existence of certain journals in their present mode would be transparency regulation that would assure that data about public action and behavior will be made available, at all levels of government--federal, state, and local--to the public . . .As money as that quote is, it's not actually the reason I liked Benkler's piece. What I really like was his calling out of the pastoral ideal of journalism that today's worry-mongers hold up as perilously close to being lost forever. Moneyer quote:
Two weeks ago and then last Friday, The Washington Post was still allowing George Will to make false claims about the analysis of a scientific study of global sea ice levels without batting an eyelid, reflecting the long-standing obfuscation of the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change by newspapers that, in the name of balanced reporting, reported the controversy rather than the actual scientific consensus.You don't even have to look closely at any newspaper to see examples of this pernicious little habit of reporting the controversy as opposed to like, you know, the actual facts (any story on intelligent design can serve as a case study). Glenn Greenwald consistently does a good job of pointing out this behavior, like in this withering takedown of former NBC White House correspondent David Gregory, who said this about the media's performance in the lead-up to the Iraq war: "I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role."
None of this is to say that there's no good journalism out there. There's plenty. But it doesn't help to pretend that the way we've been doing things is some Platonic ideal of journalism. There are some branches that can be pruned in this present crisis, and it'd be a shame to waste the opportunity.
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