Internet Publishers Challenge 'Mainstream' Media, Harken Back to 19th Century Democracy
See also my more recent articles on The Blogging Phenomenon
A slew of new Internet publishers have begun to challenge the dominance of mainstream corporate media and their claims of providing fair and objective news coverage. With Thomas Paine as their model, they have warmly embraced both partisanship and advocacy.
Matt Drudge is perhaps the most well-known of these Internet-based publishers. In his book, Manifesto, Drudge writes: "In the same way Gutenberg's Bible hastened the End of The Church's stranglehold on 15th-century Europe, in the same way Thomas Paine rallied troops to fight King George, in the same way Upton Sinclair cleaned up the meatpackers with a single stroke, the Internet is liberating the Great Unwashed."
Drudge gained fame (or notoriety) for breaking the Monica Lewinsky story, and for a constant barrage of scandal coverage during the Clinton Administration. Each day he attempted to tell the world that the liberal emperor wore no clothes (often literally). He even claimed that one of President Clinton's aides was a wife-beater. When confronted with evidence that the charge wasn't true, he retracted the story a day later, but the aide, Sidney Blumenthal, sued him for defamation anyway.
Mark Carlin's BuzzFlash seeks to be a liberal version of Drudge. The "unDrudge," he calls it. He produces a daily news digest for progressives. The tone is "no-holes-barred," gossipy partisan bluntness, unapologetically liberal. "This (Bush) Administration is led by a Vietnam evader whose vice president and attorney general nominee dodged the draft. These shameless men have no scruples; they have no integrity. They ran on a deceptive platform and campaign emphasizing primarily Democratic issues. Once they were safely ensconced in the White House, they brought in the right wing wrecking crew. In short, they deceived the American public; they lied."
Each day, BuzzFlash attempts to show the world how the conservative emperor wears no clothes. "What began as a labor of love is now an established Internet presence that vigorously counteracts the right wing propaganda machine and the insipid bias of the media pundits," Carlin writes.
To justify his daily dose of advocacy journalism, he quotes a respected mainstream source,
a column by Anna Quinlan in Newsweek called, "Singing Praise To The Crazed: Administrations change, but advocates keep trying to change the world. And succeeding."
"If it takes a cadre of crazed militants to stop racial profiling, unwanted pregnancies, wife beating and gay bashing," Anna Quindlen writes, "so be it. The so-called special-interest groups will continue to be demonized and denigrated while little by little, year by year, what they believe becomes, not a political position, but an accepted commonplace. Sure, it’s a dirty job. Thank God somebody does it."
Traditional journalists look askance at the lack of objectivity shown by the likes of Drudge and Carlin.
Traditionalists assert that these new Internet news hounds contribute to the coarsening of American society.
Some have even charged that the Drudge Report, BuzzFlash and a host of other Internet publications
are anarchist, because they attempt to undermine respect for established authority. Note how Drudge fades into the background when he supports or flacks for the Bush Administration; note that BuzzFlash gained most of its readership as Bush was capturing the presidency.
Both of these publications are most popular when they run counter to the dominant culture of (take your pick) a Clinton or Bush presidency.
Reader surveys suggest the new Internet publishers are not going to replace Americans' reliance on mainstream corporate media anytime soon. When most Americans go online for news or opinion, they usually get it from mass media outlets like America Online, CNN, or MSNBC. In fact, the America Online/Time Warner deal has raised concerns that "mainstream" corporate media will continue to dominate our society, even more than before. Internet publishers, at least, do provide a wider diversity of viewpoints and require readers to utilize critical thinking skills instead of just accepting what they read at face value in whatever medium.
The Myth of Objective Journalism
There's little question that the kind of work Drudge and Carlin do was commonplace in America
until the 1930s.
The notion that journalists must maintain "objectivity" is a relatively recent phenomenon. The early American publishers were passionately involved in politics and helped bring about the Revolution. Paine is revered for his inspiring words on freedom for the common man, and in arousing the colonies to rebel against the British Redcoats. "These are the times that try men's souls," he wrote famously in 1776. "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."
Paine is "the moral father of the Internet," wrote Jon Katz in a cutting-edge 1994 article in Wired magazine. "He was one of the first to use media as a powerful weapon against an entrenched array of monarchies, feudal lords, dictators, and repressive social structures...He [made the] reading public aware for the first time of its right to encounter controversial opinions and to participate in politics....This brilliant, lonely, socially awkward progenitor pioneered the concept of the uncensored flow of ideas, and developed a new kind of communications in the service of the then-radical proposition that people should control their own lives."
Indeed, some of Paine's words are quite inspiring to Internet activists today. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," he wrote. Through new media, "we see with other eyes, we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used."
Throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century, newspapers proudly proclaimed their partisan positions.
Andrew Jackson's Democrats and Henry Clay's Whigs subsidized their own newspapers. Horace Greeley used his newspaper, New York Tribune, to lead and mobilize one wing of the Republican Party. "I founded the New York Tribune as a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged and mincing neutrality on the other," he wrote.
William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer used their newspapers to explicitly support the policies and candidates of the Democratic Party, and Henry Luce, the founder of Time, became a leading force in Republican politics. These publications succeeded in connecting citizens to a political community, and gave them confidence in a philosophy and belief system.
The problem was that they too often engaged in propagandizing and "yellow journalism"--villifying political opponents of their favored Party, fast and loose with the facts, and too quick to rush to judgment. As printing press technology improved and the ability to reach large numbers of readers expanded, the partisan journalism of the broadsheet and "penny press" gave way to a "mass media" corporate journalism governed by the economic necessity of appearing non-partisan and "objective" in order to appeal to the entire market for news, not just the group that agreed with the newspaper's politics.
Until the 1930s, readers expected their newspapers to be partisan. During Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Republican publishers became concerned that their reporters were too enthusiastically supportive of Franklin Roosevelt. Reporters and editors, tired of publishers' interference in their work, sought more "professional autonomy" and came to a gentleman's agreement with publishers that they would seek a standard of "objectivity." More often than not that meant splitting the differences between Democrat and Republican philosophies.
The emergence of national news magazines in the 1920s, national radio networks in the 1930s, and national television networks in the 1950s accelerated the "mass media" trend. The three major television networks and major publishing enterprises, all based in New York or Washington, filtered "the news," and decided what was "mainstream." They dominated the journalism industry until the 1990s, when new technologies -- cable television, with 24-hour news cycles, and the Internet -- gave voice to more diversity in the media.
The Internet makes so many different voices, perspectives and transcripts available that users have begun to see more clearly than ever before that the mainstream, so-called "objective" media also has a spin and
a bias to it. The Internet has unleashed an army of media critics who express rage and anger that mainstream media aren't giving the public what they claim they do -- "objectivity." It has been disturbing to learn that "objectivity" is so often in the eye of the beholder. Initially, at least, the Internet has undermined confidence in the mass media, and revealed its biases.
Personal Experience
Over time, as the "refreshing" perspective on some new media web sites grows stale, as the unmoderated rants and irresponsible "over-the-top" statements become increasingly tiresome, old media may regain some respect. That's certainly been my experience.
As someone trained in traditional journalism, and who spent more than two decades working for newspapers, magazines, and newsletters, I enthusiastically embraced the Internet in the early 1990s. The fresh interactivity of the Internet made me increasingly aware of the elitism, arrogance, and restraints of conventional "mainstream" journalism. How much more honest were the voices one found on the Internet, unencumbered by a unstated financial need to ply the middle of the road in order to keep their share of the mass media market.
Years later, while I still love the Internet, I certainly see that it has as many flaws as traditional journalism. Sometimes I'm nostalgic for the elitism, arrogance and restraints of conventional journalism! When I see the constant barrage of attacks from political partisans on the right and the left accusing journalists of being "shills" for the other side, the old newspaperman in me thinks, "If the journalists are being hit from both sides, it means they are probably doing a pretty good job of being fair and objective 'mainstream' journalists." The challenge for journalists is to show the public how they are being criticized by both the right and the left.
Before the Internet, the sidestreams weren't readily visible; we didn't have easy access to anything but the mainstream. When the Internet revealed to us a vast world of sidestream opinion and culture, it made us
distrust the mainstream media for keeping it from us all those years.
The Internet revealed to us that the big mainstream media corporations weren't really telling us "that's the way it is" but that's the way it is in order for certain media corporations to capture a share of the mass market.
Since logging onto the Internet, I'm probably more skeptical of everything I read, both on and off the Net.
A steady diet of reading the alternative Internet news media makes me aware of what an anarchic medium
the Internet can be. I am even more skeptical of Internet publications than I am of the mainstream. "Gatekeepers" aren't necessarily a bad thing.
Those lessons I was taught in journalism school about good writing, good taste, good judgment,
fairness, accuracy and "objectivity" -- however imperfect -- are lessons a new generation of cybersavvy writers and citizens ignore at their own, and society's peril.
Most honest mainstream journalists admit that pure objectivity is impossible. "The truth is that in
our world the facts are infinitely many, and that no newspaper could print them all...and nobody could read them all," the great columnist Walter Lippman once wrote. "We have to select some facts rather than others, and in doing that we are using not only our legs but our selective judgment of what is interesting or important or both."...
Belief Systems
All journalists "are encumbered with belief systems, social positions, workaday routines, and professional obligations--all of which affect their selection and presentation of facts," writes journalism professor Mitchell Stephens.
"Partisan journalism can be good journalism," writes Michael Barone in The American Enterprise, a national magazine of politics, business, and culture, March-April, 1996. "It is indeed the norm in other countries, and produces plenty of excellent reporting and analysis: Britain's Telegraph and Times are Conservative papers, the Guardian leans toward Labour. France's Le Monde is gauche, Figaro is droit. And in America, too, partisan journalism is often first-rate--accurate, intellectually serious, stylishly carried off....To many readers and viewers, these outlets actually aren't perceived as partisan at all, just as accurate and truthful. The paper or broadcast is telling it like it is for most of the audience."
One answer, Barone believes, is for American media to "admit its partisanship, and quit making increasingly implausible claims of objectivity." With so many new opportunities for publishers of all ideologies on the computer, feigned claims of objectivity are less important. "Accept partisanship, expand the viewpoints to more accurately reflect the nation as a whole, and then sit back and enjoy it," Barone suggests.
In his 1996 book, News Values, Chicago Tribune publisher Jack Fuller wrote that the whole idea of objectivity in journalism is naive and disingenuous. "No one has ever achieved objective journalism, and no one ever could," he writes. "The bias of the observer always enters the picture, if not coloring the details at least guiding the choice of them."
Journalism in the 21st Century Information Age may have far more in common with the decentralized, opinionated, partisan journalism of the 18th and 19th centuries than the corporate, "unbiased" journalism of the mid to late 20th century. With new media, anyone can be a reporter or a publisher just by sending e-mail to multiple recipients. In such an environment, the value of faux "objectivity" defined by corporations eager to capture or corner a market may lessen, while the value of "fairness" and "truth" -- whenever you can find them in any medium -- may increase.
Ultimately, the ability to observe and write convincingly from experience, to offer sharp analysis and use critical thinking skills, to honestly and logically address opposing points of view may become more valuable.
In any event, the one essential element of journalism--to seek and speak the truth--will not change. The best journalism will always be that which, in Fuller's phrase, links "the truth discipline in journalism with the highest standards in scientific and academic debate...and produce[s] work of genuine intellectual integrity."
Drill Deeper With These Links:
Covered Human Rights Abuses" by Frederic A. Moritz.
If you doubt that journalism today tends partisan, compare political coverage of the same event:
What do you think?
