Print and democracy
A meditation in the New Yorker a few days ago on the death of newspapers and the implications for democracy. It is by Eric Alterman and titled ‘Out Of Print’.
There are nine main points:
1/ After a lifespan of 300 years the American newspaper industry is suffused with a palpable sense of doom. The rise of the internet has made it look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist has wiped out classified advertising revenue. Newspaper stocks are collapsing e.g. NY Times company has declined 54% since the end of 2004.
2/ Public trust in newspaper has slipped in concert with the bottom line. Fewer than 20% of Americans believe “all or most” media reporting. More Americans believe in flying saucers than believe in the notion of balanced mainstream news.
3/ Most managers have reacted with a spiral of budget cuts: bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs and reductions in page size. As one columnist, Molly Ivins, complained: the newspapers’ solution has been to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting”. Philip Meyer in The Vanishing Newspaper predicts the final copy of the final newspaper will be printed in 2043.
4/ The idea of news itself has changed from editors telling us what we should know, to getting a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened and being able to talk about and debate this with people who think about the world in similar ways.
5/ If Arthur Miller is right and a good newspaper is “a nation talking to itself” then the Huffington Post is a great newspaper. In two years it has acquired 11m unique visitors per month which is more than all but eight newspaper sites. And it is growing!
6/ Huffington Post has very light editorial interference - they operate the “mullet strategy” (business up front, party in the back). So the home page is controlled while the inside pages are full of the musings of an army of both celebrity and non-celebrity bloggers.
7/The tension between the mainstream media and the web was presaged by the early 20th century debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. Lippmann likened the average American to a deaf spectator in the back row at a sporting event. “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen”. Effectively his suggestion was to junk democracy and see journalism as a function of the intellectual ruling elite. Dewey saw democracy like a focus group; people needed to discuss and deliberate ideas. “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches”.
8/ The Lippmann model, in which politics became a business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed, remained unchallenged until the Reagan revolution when the conservative counter-establishment attempted to seize the reins of democratic authority from the liberal media elite. The liberal version of this is now evident in the anti-Bush blogosphere. Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo relies on an army of collaborators who give him a huge amount of valuable information that is not always available to mainstream reporters.
9/ But what happens to democracy when we can no longer depend upon newspapers to invest their unmatched resources in helping people to learn what we need to know? Print and online models will converge: Huffington will hire more staff and the NY Times will do more distributed journalism, more wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting. We are about to enter a chaotic world of news characterised by superior community conversation but diminished first-rate journalism. We will lose the single national narrative and agreed “set of facts” by which to conduct our politics. And what happens to democracy then?
Add comment April 15th, 2008