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January 31, 2008
In The blind newsmaker at Open Democracy Tony Curzon Price says that the mass industrial media, at their best, perform two basic public functions. First, they monitor and hold to account, and second, they form and maintain a common purpose, an ``imaginary community''. These are ``negative'' and ``positive'' tasks: avoiding the worst excesses of power and rule by experts; and defining and sustaining a common good.
This is the public role of the media as the watchdog for democracy in a nation-state view. Behind this stands the history of nation building, the peoples voice, nationality, freedom of the press and professionalism journalism with its ethos of objectivity and neutrality. This constellation is decaying and it is generally held that the press fell asleep at the wheel after 9/11 as they failed to ask the tough questions. Fox News is the new kind of media.
Price notes the decline of the mainstream media in a digital age-- due to dropping circulation and print advertising revenue falling---and he asks:
Techno-optimists believe that the hyper-modularity of the future of news-making will allow us to re-assemble whatever value was produced in the old system. But the two essential public functions of the news are inherently the products of un-fragmented processes. The troubling question becomes: who will protect us from the excesses of power? and what sorts of common projects and shared identities will flourish in the fragmentary world? What power will we permit to emerge, and who will we become?
Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, argues as a paper-optimist that the old institutions will simply transfer online, and that revenues online will rise fast enough for the old model of production to survive.
The Guardian looks as if it is able to deliver whilst The New York Times is struggling to find a viable business model after its experiment with a subscription wall failed and the hedge finds are circling.
Price argues that all the components of the newspaper's two core functions will continue to be produced, often in a very fragmented way. He mentions the Security Council Report for the negative power of speaking truth to power and The Arts And Letters portal as an example of the defining and sustaining a common good function.
Update
Is this fragmentation happening in Australia? Yes. The Bulletin magazine has gone --it largely became irrelevant---and Crikey is an example of the formation of digitally based watchdog truth to power, even though this is not recognized as professional journalism. The ABC, as the national broadcaster, looks as if it is able to follow the Guardian or BBC pathway to a viable digital presence.
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Price's arguments are interesting although the imagined community role of newspapers depends on a simultaneous reading by a public - at least that's Ben Anderson's explanation in his 'Imagined communities'.
I suppose another question is whether or not we will imagine ourselves as the same type of community as we read and post whatever forms of news and opinion are produced on line. I've only visited Arts and Letters a few time, and have yet to feel a sense of community there I can imagine.
At minimum, a shift from the simultaneity of mass media consumption to a more multi-temporal consumption will produce publics that are either out of sync or able to mobilise, or be mobilsed, very quickly.
And so back to Price's anxiety about power.