Tower of Babel?

As the first internet president prepares to take office, it's time to ask whether the new media environment is a triumph of democracy or a Tower of Babel.

The answer is that it's a little of both. Thanks to the internet, voices and opinions not backed by wads of cash can actually make it into the media mainstream.

On the other hand, the fragmentation of the media into many niche markets can actually create a threat to democracy. When everybody is saying everything, too often it's the trivial, the sensational or simply misinformation that gets heard. When "the press" becomes all of us, who holds power accountable? As Juvenal asked, "Who shall guard the guardians?"

Are citizen journalists real journalists? They can be, but are volunteer journalists a substitute for a professional and well-funded press corps? At a recent panel at George Washington university on the internet, politics and the press, the point was made that there are plenty of jobs for young journalists out there on the internet--unless you need ephemera like a half-decent salary and benefits. There are jobs, but are there careers?

The disinterested journalist (not objective; objectivity doesn't exist outside the double blind study) with no axe to grind is essential to monitoring the powerful. But guardians don't come cheap, and fragmentation doesn't help the quality of journalism. Just look at what's happened to local TV news as the number of channels exploded; it's a shadow of its former self. Big city stations that once had full-time statehouse and city hall reporters as well as investigative units, now offer up murders, fires, car crashes, and lots and lots of weather.

Today, as we see our great newspapers in danger of crashing to the ground like the dinosaurs, we may be losing a resource vital to the republic that can't be easily replaced. What newspapers offer is a cadre of well trained and well paid professionals who not only offer shoe-leather reporting but context, history and institutional memory. You can't do this on the cheap. Newspapers also speak in a voice loud enough to be heard above the din. They can actually create change.

One good example: In the 1970s, the" inner belt", a second circumferential highway, was planned for Boston, backed by powerful interests. It would have ripped-up stable working-class neighborhoods, plowed under green space, destroyed wetlands and massively increased pollution. When my late husband, Alan Lupo, started covering protests against the highway, it was considered a lost cause. But he kept on writing about the road's harmful impact for the Boston Globe, and slowly, slowly, minds began to change. In the end, the governor killed the highway, an early environmental triumph. That would not have happened without the power of a newspaper.

Would the Watergate crimes have come to light without the relentless digging of Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post? Would the Pentagon papers have surfaced without the New York Times? Would the pedophilia in the Catholic Church have become a national story without the investigative team of the Boston Globe? Probably not.

We need a press powerful enough to rival other power centers, like government and the corporate state. We desperately need a new economic structure to save newspapers -- even if their news no longer appears on paper but goes to your I pod or eventually gets beamed directly into your brain. We can't just rely on bloggers or citizen journalists who are nearly always outgunned. At a recent Boston University panel on the future of the non- fiction book, authors bemoaned that fact that newspapers no longer give their reporters book leaves. Many of the best non fiction books came about when journalists built on years of reporting they had done for their newspapers to create widely read, award-winning books. Today, unless you already have a best seller under your belt or live on a trust fund, you simply can't afford in-depth reporting on your own.

At the BU panel, crack investigative reporter Ron Suskind noted the shrinking of the press corps, and said that politicians were feeling less afraid of the press, because fewer of the reporters who used to be there day in and day out were still around. The pols, he said, were happy to see them go. Fewer prying eyes, more power for them.

How we pay for serious journalism in the future is a critical question for the nation. We can't let our great newspapers disappear with a bang -- or even with a whimper.
We need them to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable with all the firepower they can muster, and in the steady, relentless -- and expensive -- style that few other media can achieve.

New media needs the Right Stuff that old media once delivered.

Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University and the author of Selling Anxiety: How the News Media scare Women." (University Press of New England.

Comments

[UtahLiberal435]

Journalism is what's important. That's been lacking in all forms of delivery. And newspapers, in and of themselves, are simply poorly used timber resources that account for nearly 30% of most urban landfills.

Electronic, broadcast, or print, it's the ideas - not the medium - that's important.

Unfortunately, investigative journalism has been lacking in all these media delivery forms.
But punditry, no shortage there.

[1will]

After seeing how biased the media was in last years Presidental Election I'm uninterested in a more powerful media. Most of the MSM should have been classified as a 527 group in the last election. I have no desire to see an American version of Pravda circa 1970.

[Chavez08]

Dear traditional press establishment,

You (electronic AND print media orgs) in this country have failed us, over and over again and you've sold out to the corporate oligarchy and transformed from a collection of journalists, truth-seekers to multinational propagandists. You've engaged in white-washes, cover-ups, all out lies on behalf of the corporate estgablishment in their quest for empire and Plutocratic rule. Your stories, if not one-sided, were almost always skewed to reflect the views of the wealthy, powerful few to the detriment of the masses and our American Republic.

It is far easier to find the truth in the Internet age. Bloggers, although they are not as eloquent, stylish and many don't have advanced, expensive degrees from elitist colleges, are extremely talented at collecting and communicating news so that people can again be enlightened and educated as opposed to being brainwashed or insulted.

Your pleas should fall mostly on deaf ears because, If it weren't for your inherent lack of credibility and honor, the effects on your industry by technology wouldn't be near as profound.

Good bye.

[ADVOCATE4ZPG]

Degrees and collegiate elitism are almost irrevelent to this discussion. What you seem to value is cheerleading bordering on rabble-rousing as opposed to ORGANIZED, STRUCTURED investigation, i.e., traditional reportage. The latter requires experienced judgment balanced--it is to be hoped--by a background in applicable history and informed by CONTACTS within the corporate/governmental entities subject to scrutiny.

Handwaving accusations anchored in sophomoric understanding of political theories, rants over apocryphal injustices, and sappy manipulations of hard cases serve no more good and offen no more informational utility than advertising jingles and forced images.......

Should you require more "immediate," more populist, more plebian sourcing, SPEND MORE TIME at YOUR TAVERN. There all news begins with the moral bias you hunger for.....

[dfwcarpentry]

It saddens me to see all the comments to Ms. Rivers are negative. She is spot on to defend the institution (and the Amendment) which is vital to the security of the nation. The only discrepency is how the reporters get paid. I do not have an answer to this, yet I believe in some form, sharing of the factual information and important opinions are worth more than the dissolving of the institution altogether.

[hopeless277]

Kind of like in Citizen Kane?

[1Marie23]

The new media? When did it begin? I doubt it will make it. I won't pay for a paper. Will you? I go to blogs where people are reporting what they see. Would we still have things disclosed, yes I do believe we would. Think blue dress, and Dan Rather. The new media is the blog.

[Barrack69]

Crimey: Are newspapers the next whiners on the list for a government bailout?

[larry278]

HuffPost's Pick

If the buggy whip industry is properly funded it too can recover from the pox the internal cumbustion afflicted on this once vital industry. The horse & mule may again move passanger vehicles since oil is in short supply. The electric car isn't ready to take the place of an automobile moved by a powered internal combustion engine If we let our newspapers die due to the instant, custom fitted, news of the www, we may have to reinvent the newspaper, its reporters, editors, printers & delivery network of trucks & paper boys/girls.
The newspaper has had to compete with the web, citizen journalists, feckless yentas & monitors/editors. The newspaper has lost the competition. The reporter, editor, printer, delivery people of a newspaper now will disappear as the braider & maker of buggy whips disappeared.
The www gathers & distributes news that a user can tailor to his/her desires/needs.
The web will develop ways to insure that the news it distributes is accurate to replace the papers reporters, fact checkers, proof readers & editors. The web user, not the newspaper publisher or editor, will decide which events are important & interesting enough to be news. The web use will select coverage of events posted on various web sites which appeals to the individual web user. An unreliable web site will be avoided by web users. Truth appears to expose lies & incomplete information in a mysterious way in a free environment. Free people are relentlessly nosey. They dig into everything.