I am slowly matching velocity with the world after an absence due to technical problems, something I may expostulate on later. So much has happened I hardly know what to comment on first. So I’ll just pick one…
There seems to be quite an interesting discussion circulating the blog world about The Meaning Of Life, The Universe and Everything and Our Place In It. As I have not yet seen anyone tell it as I sees it and I’ve not much else to do with a Friday Night Sniffle (as opposed to a Saturday Night Fever), I have all the excuse I need.
A reader of Patrick Ruffini pointed out blogs are not newsgathering organizations. I agree with that. Of course if the phenomenon continues to grow that may become less and less true. I live in Belfast for example. If blogs existed ten years ago, my reportage would have been first-hand man on the scene calibre. I once posted a report to a mail list while watching the fires of Unionist rioters springing up all over the city while I was stranded in a 6th floor office in the middle of a “no man’s land” between neighborhoods in North Belfast. I watched the pall of smoke grow thicker and thicker until I could no longer see the lights of the city centre less than a half mile away. Someday when there is a blog on every block they may well become the primary source for raw news. But for now that is not why blogs exist and it is not why they are a force to be reckoned with all out of proportion to their size and readership.
Most of what we call “the news media” is simply the infrastructure that gathers facts, photos and documents. It is the mundane and sometimes extremely dangerous collection of raw data. Doing this well requires global resources. It used to be one of the primary functions of news before the advent of the Superstar TV Newsman. In the early stages of this transformation there were newsmen like Walter Cronkite who were respected because they were good at what they did and were clearly part of their own culture.
It didn’t take the network news long to discover the power they could wield by deciding what would be reported with what slant. Some say the turning point was the Kennedy/Nixon debate. A change in camera angle, a slight difference in which images are selected and which are not… and you can pick the winners and losers, the innocent and the guility and set the national and perhaps even the global agenda. If one major outlet pushes a story as the lead, all the others typically follow it or find related stories. While it is true that print media and radio had done the same with considerable success for many decades, they did not have the profound subconscious story telling ability of imagery on their side. Although we laugh at the what if satires of CNN and D-Day or Pearl Harbour, we should perhaps be profoundly grateful that they did not then exist.
Over time the star system led to a more paternalistic news system. It became more about deciding what the news was to be. If the newsmen are Stars and know what we should consider important then we inevitably end up with their beliefs and prejudices buried in that selection. Intentional or not, the effect is equally bad. It has reached the point where the relevance of a story to the public is of less importance than the relevance to the political beliefs of the media personnel. Of course all bets are off if there is a human interest story of no importance whatever (such as the OJ Simpson Trial). It will be the lead simply because it is an extremely profitable form of entertainment. Media is a business and there nothing wrong with that. Many millions of people love soap operas. But this is not an effective way to keep a citizenry informed.
That is where the blog revolution comes in. Blogs are anarchic. The entry cost is low and falling so anyone who wants can jump in. If the new blogger has ideas and communicates well they will collect a readership; if they grow tired of it someone else with similar ideas will take up the slack and the readership. Any thought that can be thought will be written, rewritten, torn apart and reassembled a hundred times. The better the idea, the more relevant and interesting and important it is, the more widely it will spread… regardless of to whose interest or detriment it is. That is the glory of Chaos.
If we look at the current war we see time and again that the Media Formerly Known as Major have been called to task over their spin and over the central framework of the Story they decided to tell. A decade or two ago, I and others would have grumbled to our mates in the local and said they were getting it wrong. But we would have left it at that because we had no voice in the matter. After enough repetition of the Story, we might come to agree with it or at the very least begun to argue within the designated framework of the Story. That is what classical rhetoric is all about for those who know what it is. It is also what Marxists called the Dialectic.
Now don’t get me wrong. I do not believe that the global media is going to shrivel up and die. It serves a purpose. Journalism was once and can once again be an honourable profession if it goes back to its’ roots and forgets the Star thing. Someone has to go out and collect the raw data. What has changed is who makes the decision on what the data means, what is important and to what use it should be put. That is now the niche of the blog.
All Hail Eris!
