August 20, 2007
Michael Skube comments on political blogging in the LA Times, recognizes that bloggers are more than being amateur journalists.Though Skube's argument is not clear, he refers to the idea of public debate, and so moves the debate on from blogger v journalists, which is the media's framing of the issue. However, he remains blind to contemporary journalism's dumping its watchdog for democracy function, and he does not explore the way that bloggers are becoming the watchdogs that watch the watchdog.
Skube starts by raising the issue of public debate. He references Christopher Lasch's argument in his "The Lost Art of Argument," in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995). In this essay Lasch sheds light on the issues of superficiality and bias in the media. The media is full of badly written political propaganda, celebrity news, sports and entertainment and lifestyle information. Consequently, we citizens are losing contact with the debate over vital issues and are becoming disengaged from the democratic life of our cities and nations. Skube quotes Lasch's words:
What democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can only be generated by debate. We do not know what we need until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy.
Skube is sceptical about bloggers arguing and debating about public issues and so helping to form the vigorous public debate that Lasch calls for. The blogosphere, for Skube, is the 'loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.' Bloggers are more than that though. They are involved in public debate.
Skube does not reckon that bloggers are achieving the public debate that Lasch was calling for. He says:
now we have the opportunity to witness it in practice, thanks to the blogosphere, and the results are less than satisfying. One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks.
He acknowledges that bloggers are changing what is euphemistically called the national "conversation." He asks: what is the nature of that change? Does it deepen our understanding? Does it broaden our perspective?
Skube's answer is obvious--it's all opinion not reasoned argument in the blogosphere. In fact argument is a word that elevates blogosphere comment to a level it seldom attains on its own. He concludes:
The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells.
Skube's affirmation of old -fashioned gumshoe reporting--- thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance---ignores the way that this is not a characteristic of mainstream media either. So why dump on bloggers and not question the practices pf the media?
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Skube's piece is an opinion column. Funny that, using an opinion column in an MSM newspaper to criticise opinion in the blogosphere.
In that final par he seems to be missing a big chunk of the equation. OK, so a gumshoe reporter does the investigating and the objective truth, to the extent that it's known, is published whereupon we get to form opinions about it.
The Haneef story is a good example of how things happen in real life. To get a scoop the media publishes whatever it has when it comes to hand. Stories get dribbled out bit by bit, and the consequences that follow are also part of the ongoing story. Watergate is the classic example of opinion shaping the outcome.
The circular relationship between reporting and opinion has always been there, it's just instant and instantly observable these days. Journos don't get to own the story for as long as they used to.
Utopian models of public debate seem to have emphasised information and communications channels and minimised the "public" bit. If we're just a big, messy, opinionated inconvenience why bother with democracy at all?