POINT OF VIEW
Musings on the New Media and the Old
Excerpted from the Joe Creason Lecture delivered by John S. Carroll at the University of Kentucky on April 1, 2008. Carroll has been the editor of three newspapers: the Lexington Herald-Leader, The Sun of Baltimore, and the Los Angeles Times.
When the blogs were invented, there was euphoria. “Ding dong, the witch is dead!” the bloggers sang lustily – the witch being the old media, who were about to get what they deserved.
But blogging turns out to be a hard business. The money is generally lousy, and there’s a constant struggle to get and hold an audience.
It’s tough in other ways, too. There is a centrifugal force in blogging. If you are a moderate and portray the world in thoughtful shades of gray, your audience will abandon you. The loneliest place in the blogosphere is the middle of the road.
Although blogs have contributed much to the national discussion, they offer only a rare flash of original reporting. For fresh information, the blogs remain deeply dependent on the old media, which they simultaneously deplore and utilize extensively.
Perhaps someday the blogs will make enough money to employ reporters in significant numbers. But that day is not in sight.
In general, the marketplace of ideas is enriched by the addition of new voices. But not all new voices are journalistic. Some are decidedly un-journalistic, aimed not at serving the public but at manipulating it.
Imperfect as the old media are, they are imbued with deeply held ethical convictions. At the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, the betrayals of the Staples and Jayson Blair scandals provoked insurrections. In both cases, feelings in the newsroom were so volcanic that calm could only be restored by dismissing the top leadership.
This sense of ethics – this sense of what a journalist does and doesn't do – is built into the old media. But among much of the new media, it is a foreign language.
Will journalism – real journalism – triumph over propaganda? Over marketing? Over disinformation?
The advent of the lone blogger has touched something in the nation’s collective memory. Bloggers see themselves as heirs to the pamphleteers who were prominent in the American Revolution. I think they’re right. If Thomas Paine were alive, no doubt he’d be blogging away.
But one important thing has changed since those early days: Institutions have grown. Government has become huge. Business is huge. The tools of spin and of deception are huge and sophisticated. And, likewise, institutions of journalism have grown, too.
It seems to me that big, institutional journalism – not just a din of individual voices – is still needed.
Consider the story in The New York Times that exposed the wiretapping of American citizens by the National Security Agency, which was done without court warrants as required by law.
The sordid history of illegal wiretapping by American officials, national and local, tells us why electronic surveillance must be regulated by law – and by law that cannot be wiped off the books secretly.
To me, The Times’ decision, despite its detractors, was a patriotic act. It was patriotic because it reflected concern for historic American values: the rule of law; the role of Congress as a co-equal branch of government; and the citizen’s right against unreasonable intrusion by government.
But the administration of President George W. Bush and its claques on the talk shows smeared The Times as unpatriotic, even traitorous, and demanded that it be criminally prosecuted for sedition.
Think, now, about what a blogger would face in attempting what The Times did.
First of all, it is unlikely that a blog would have the reportorial horsepower to break the story. The two Times reporters, both of whom I’m acquainted with, represent decades of investment. Their professional development included years of cultivating of national security sources in Washington and abroad.
Blogs generally don’t have reporters, and they certainly don’t have reporters as well trained and proficient as these two. So it’s doubtful that a blog could have broken this story in the first place.
And if a blog did manage to break the story, it would likely be crushed in the aftermath. The opprobrium from the talk shows and the administration would devastate all but the toughest of individuals, and the legal bills could be a ticket to bankruptcy.
A blog, valuable as it is, is simply not an institution with enough heft to stand up to big government and big business. We need institutions of journalism, muscular institutions, not just individual voices.
My hope is that the new media, these wondrous vehicles for individual self-expression, will continue doing what they're already doing: enriching the national conversation, keeping the old media honest and creating entirely new languages of journalism. I also hope that they'll find ways to make more money and thereby to employ reporters in meaningful numbers.
At the same time, I'm hoping that the old media will continue to employ large teams of professional journalists, to propagate their traditional definition of ethical journalism, and, when necessary, to stand up decisively to the government and other big institutions.
With the combination of the two – the old media and the new – we, with a little luck and hard work, could be embarking on something quite wonderful. Something a jaded old editor might even acknowledge as unprecedented, even historic. Possibly – just possibly – we might live to see a new age, a golden age of journalism.