THE CRISIS OF JOURNALISM

I've been wanting to write something like this for a while now. But I couldn't do it as well. This is an amazingly cogent summary of the mainstream media's peculiar ideology:

This collective view emerged as a rather well-intentioned product of an age of wild hope, ill-informed academic speculation, and youthful optimism about the world. Nurtured in the great European and American universities, it was statist, existentialist, anti-religious, suspicious of any science that did not support its views, snobbish, pacifist, anti-technological, hedonistic in practice, puritan in theory, postmodernist in its tastes, committed to a social rather than an individual morality, hostile to the virtue tradition, sentimentally Romanticist in its attitude to Nature (which, in an unconsciously Creationist turn, did not include human beings), relativist about cultural differences, legalistic, optimistic about human nature, and deeply hostile to the marketplace. In one sense it was a nostalgia for the aristocratic European world of our collective rose-tinted memory, when the virtues of artists and intellectuals and university-educated people were recognized automatically, and merchants and financiers were "rightly" despised. In another sense it was a yearning for the dear lost days of revolutionary fervor, moral certainty, "free" sex and callow cynicism about tradition and respectability. It was escapist in its worship of Otherness -- cultural, social, political, economic, ideological, sexual, biological -- and conformist in its anxious attention to the next move of its "coolest" current leadership.

In the past couple of years, this peculiar ideology has become more corruptly self-conscious to the point where:

Editorializing crept into the news pages and then right out onto the front page above the fold. The editorializing, with its suppressions, its half-truths, its word-choices, and so on, carried an odd double-entendre -- for the cognoscenti, an implicit acknowledgement that this was useful strategic rhetoric to be used for the campaign, and for the rubes, all the solemn garb of scientific or historical or judicial gravity. Talk radio is hilariously explicit about its leanings and its spin, and is honest at least in that. Internet bloggers assume that they cannot fool their readers into thinking that their propositions come from the oracular lips of Truth. They are thus more trustworthy, oddly enough, than the Gray Ladies of the traditional journalism.

This is exactly what has driven me to the blogs in the past couple of years. The condescension of the New York Times just gets too hard to take. It's a little bit like when Martin Luther went to Rome and saw the corruption of the priests there and was shocked into launching the Reformation. You get to the point where you can practically watch the NYT tricking you and deceiving you in front of your eyes, but that's not even the real problem: the problem is that they act as if you had a duty to just sit there passively and let them do it. Fox News is my favorite news channel because they have a slant, they know what it is, you know what it is. You don't have to be convinced. I don't always agree with them. I would watch al-Jazeera, or a socialist news channel, almost as readily as Fox News. The NYT has its usefulness, I should say, in reporting facts, and I love Tom Friedman, and Paul Krugman is even worth taking to the cleaners now and then. But the pretense of objectivity is like having a bag over your head; it's hard to breathe, and sometimes you want to scream.

What's better still, though, is that Turner explains why this is, or at least, might be, a good thing:

As such institutions as coffee-houses, town meetings, old fashioned barber shops, primary caucuses, soap box gatherings, debates, and suchlike fell into disuse, and the networks and newspapers took over, the Public itself began to disappear, to be replaced by a segmented demographic mass swayed by centralized journalistic voices and shaped by polls. What is now happening is that rather swiftly a new Public is forming, self-organizing around Google and link lists and blog chatrooms. And it will demand a new Res Publica.

The article I planned to write would be a bit different. I wanted to present a model of how an information and news economy could operate without the big media organizations. Title: "The De-Professionalization of Journalism." Maybe I'll get around to it.