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August 7, 2010
A quote from a comment on a post by Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing on claims by the editor of the Financial Times defending newspaper paywalls whilst attacking the old slogan that information wants to be free:
I suggest that much of today's media like to refer to as "journalism" resembles that craft much in the same way that a McDonald's meal resembles a healthy diet. Which means that even when distributed free, much of the corporate spam that some would pass as journalism is overpriced and indeed harmful.
Few would disagree with this in the context of the media's coverage of the current federal election. Most of it is junk that is best avoided if you hold that a healthy conversation over issues in a vibrant public sphere is a good thing for democracy. There is both a public disgust with the white noise of the press, and an intellectual crisis in journalism.
James Carey, the media theorist, argued in his Communication as Culture that democratic politics was born in the domain of oral exchange in a public sphere in which there is face to face discussion and conversation, as in the townhall and public square meetings. Democratic politics and reason are the products of an oral tradition that embraces discussion and argument, relies on the devices of memory and is free from the domination of experts and elites who seek to protect special interests and monopolies of knowledge.
The term conversion applies to speech, stylized writing, journalism and scholarship. Journalism, Cary contends, is more akin to storytelling and argument; a process of making society intelligible, which also means inhabitable by all.
Our conversation is now technologically mediated, and our modern electronic and digital systems of communication have drastically altered our experience and practices, and shaped the ordinary structures of interest and feeling. The media has made possible the grafting of the vivid democracy of the Greek city state on a continental scale and it is protected so as to amplify the debate of democracy, to serve as a check on government and to help bind the nation together.
Strong press, strong democracy is the argument. Carey wrote:
The press justifies itself in the name of the public,” the press scholar James Carey wrote. “It exists—or so it is regularly said—to inform the public, to serve as the extended eyes and ears of the public, to protect the public’s right to know, to serve the public interest.
That was then.
Now we are no longer one nation under television. The media fails us in terms of facilitating the conversation amongst citizens and, as a result, there is a decline of the audience for journalism. Journalism suffers from a credibility crisis and the growing cynicism about the media's role in liberal democracy. All terms of the political equation—democracy, public opinion, public discourse, the press—are now up for grabs.
One pathway is to uncouple "journalism" from "media," while recoupling "journalism" to the keyword "democracy." The sign indicates deliberate democracy and that implies a core commonality of shared information.
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Maybe the "news” has always been heavily partisan and often colored by the rhetorical vitriol?
Today we have a movement toward the narrower interests of the niche: partisan political platforms, narrow-topic outlets, hyperlocal and microlocal sites, RSS and Twitter feeds, mine magazine, etc.
Newspapers, general-interest magazines, and broadcasters, on the other hand, are generally shrinking, splitting, or refashioning themselves as specialty outlets. When, that is, they’re not dying out altogether.
Maybe we are returning to the freewheeling days before radio and television launched the very idea of mass media—the era of partisan newspapers and pamphleteers.