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December 30, 2010
In Murdoch's search for an answer to content theft in The Age Gordon Farrer, the technology editor of The Age, says that if Murdoch's model of restricting access to news content spreads to most (if not all) traditional media outlets, then journalism could split into two camps. This argument is initially plausible.
He says that in one camp there:
will be the content produced by professional journalists, backed by large organisations and traditional news-gathering structures that include several levels of editing and fact-checking, plus researching resources. This content will have to be paid for by consumers and — thanks to technological restrictions — it won’t be easily shared in social media or aggregated by search engines. It will become niche-focused news: in-depth and difficult to produce at one end; sensationalist and entertaining at the other.
In the other camp there:
will be citizen journalism: free of charge, easily searched, easily shared, more reliant on the individual writer's skills and news sense, probably shaped as much by popularity (sensationalism and entertainment value) as newsworthiness.
So we have two different types of journalism, each with their own pluses and minuses. It is a useful starting point. The most obvious flaw is that it ignores the public broadcasters who provide professional content free. And that causes problems for Murdoch and Fairfax.
Farrer then goes on to comment:
Because of the evolving restrictions to accessing ‘‘old media’’ news content — paywalls and apps that don’t allow searching, sharing or cutting and pasting of content — the citizen journalism camp will not be able to rely as much as it has on professional journalists’ content for inspiration. That is, the bloggers and tweeters and Facebook posters who riff/comment on/analyse traditional media journalism will have to go elsewhere for fodder.
Farrer's assumption that Murdoch and Fairfax provide quality assumption that bloggers then riff off is undercut by what passes for professional journalism in the mainstream media today. A lot is infortainment, much is recycled press releases, public relations junk and deception. Public opinion surveys on honesty and ethics reveal that journalists, advertising personnel, and public relations practitioners score at the bottom of those surveys.
Only some bits and pieces of professional journalism can be considered quality journalism, often from the same journalist. Newspapers are becoming more opinion and comment based, often with a political bias since it is the 24 hour television channels that deliver the news to us.
Secondly, some bloggers provide quality commentary and analysis that mainstream journalists riff/comment on--- the latter rarely analyse. Thirdly, Farrer has no idea of a dialogic public sphere in which the deliberation about issues gives rise to the ongoing conversation in the public sphere---such as the one about the changing nature of the media in a digital liberal democracy.
A deliberative democracy represents an attempt to counteract the deficits of representative democracy, particularly in terms of legitimacy.
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There is distrust of journalists because the practice of public relations can certainly be used to control human beings through deception, rather than to stimulate exchange or communicate ideas. Murdoch's papers are about power, control, manipulation. They work from a closed adversarial standpoint.
These monologic forms of public relations do not allow more than one perspective to ask questions or influence debate.