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Friday Fronts
28 March 2008:
Eric Alterman on the Future of Journalism, in The New Yorker
This will be brief, as I have very recently — two weeks ago — touched on today's subject, which is the material decline of Western journalism. The business model for the production of daily news reports, long regarded as an essential ingredient of democratic culture, is breaking down, or may in fact have broken down already. Where John Lanchester wrote, in the London Review of Books, of the drying-up of support for traditional journalists, Eric Alterman writes, in The New Yorker ("Out of Print"), about the drying-up of traditional journalism's audience. Young people simply don't read newspapers. As we all know, they're increasingly prone to find out about the world on the Internet, particularly at Web logs. Whether Web logs are or aren't doing a better job of presenting the world than traditional journalists, their parasitical dependence upon traditional journalism is both indisputable and unsustainable. Mr Alterman does not come right out and say that the new medium cannot survive the extinction of the old, but his essay makes any other conclusion difficult to imagine.
Mr Alterman is at least as occupied by what would once have been called a "quarrel," between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, about the true nature of democracy. For Lippmann, democracy was wholly representational, with more or less ignorant voters electing more or less qualified legislators to do the job of making laws without much regard for public opinion. John Dewey preferred the model of participatory democracy, in which the members of society partake of countless informed conversations about current affairs in orderr to determine who the representatives ought to be. Mr Alterman correctly notes that today's abandonment of the "MSM" for the Internet is tantamount to a switch from Lippmann's outlook to Dewey's — and that the challenge to authority began on the right.
The Lippmann model received its initial challenge from the political right. Many conservatives regarded the major networks, newspapers, and newsweeklies—the mainstream media—as liberal arbiters, incapable of covering without bias the civil-rights movement in the South or Barry Goldwater’s Presidential campaign. They responded by building think tanks and media outlets designed both to challenge and to bypass the mainstream media. The Reagan revolution, which brought conservatives to power in Washington, had its roots not only in the candidate’s personal appeal as a “great communicator” but in a decades-long campaign of ideological spadework undertaken in magazines such as William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s National Review and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary and in the pugnacious editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, edited for three decades by Robert Bartley. The rise of what has come to be known as the conservative “counter-establishment” and, later, of media phenomena such as Rush Limbaugh, on talk radio, and Bill O’Reilly, on cable television, can be viewed in terms of a Deweyan community attempting to seize the reins of democratic authority and information from a Lippmann-like élite.
Which is all very nice; but who's going to pay to keep those Deweyan communities informed?
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