Steve Reads

I don’t really have the time to give Eric Alterman’s piece on blogs from the most recent New Yorker the denunciation it so richly deserves, but here are a few quick notes:

1. Read Alterman’s piece and then read this piece of junk from today’s New York Times, whose précis is as follows:

   Asking a Judge to Save the World, or More By DENNIS OVERBYE

   Two men are pursuing a lawsuit to stop scientists from using a giant particle accelerator, saying it could create a black hole that might eat up the Earth.

   A moment’s googling convinces even the meanest intelligence that these people are cranks. New York Times is the nation’s soi-disant paper of record, and yet it publishes trash like this?

   We needn’t even mention the press’s complicity in the Iraq War.

2. The Alterman piece does a very New Yorker thing: it follows around one person or one organization — in this case the Huffington Post — and takes it as a perfect crystallization of a larger issue. HuffPo has certain editorial problems and reveals the problems in democracy; ergo, blogs as an institution suffer from the same problem. The problem is that the New World Order is not HuffPo v. New York Times; the New World Order is all blogs v. New York Times. When I want to find out about a recent court decision, I don’t consult some generalized blog, no matter how good that blog is; I consult Balkinization. When I want to read about science, I consult science Ph.D.s of various stripes. The fight is between generalized media written by journalism-school graduates with limited understanding of specialized domains, and specialists who may or may not know how to write for a mass audience. The specialists are winning hands down, at least from my perspective.

3. Alterman’s piece doesn’t grok what democracy is all about. I think my dear friend Adam Rosi-Kessel did the best job summarizing why democracy is important in a piece about the Critical Mass bike movement years ago:

   The main difference that CM makes, I believe, is in the time between rides, when otherwise depoliticized cyclists start to take action; to write letters to their representatives and city councillors; to argue with their neighbors, families, and friends; to become increasingly aware of the primary role that the private automobile plays in determining foreign and domestic policy, in separating out rich from poor and black from white, in causing more deaths, injuries, and illnesses than all of the leading ‘public health’ villains.

   (Any broader interpretation I attach to Adam’s piece is, of course, my own, and any mistakes are mine rather than his.)

   Even if democracy yielded suboptimal results, it would be worthwhile. The point of democracy is not that it gives us superb highways; the point is that it gives people control over their own lives in a way that no other system does. (As it happens, democracy does yield better outcomes.) I’m sure Alterman understands this, but his article doesn’t give me great faith that he’s internalized it.

4. If the major media have to be defended on the grounds that “they’re less democratic, but their elitism makes them a privileged source of information,” then haven’t they obviously failed? Doesn’t point 1) make that clear? So on what grounds, exactly, do we yearn to rescue major media from their (long-running) demise?

5. By focusing on “New York Times v. HuffPo,” we’re not only narrowly focusing on one tiny corner of the world’s blogs — we’re also focusing on one tiny corner of the major media. For at least 20 years, we’ve swallowed a steadily increasing amount of News You Can Use, celebrity gossip, and trivialized major stories. Indeed, the Alterman piece is an instance of a larger press problem: reducing a systemic issue to something specific that the reader — more likely the journalist himself — can get his head around. (See, for instance, a broad abuse of power reduced to one specific prison or even one sadistic soldier.)

   So zoom out from the Times a little bit. The end of the major media — if it comes — will mean more than just the end of the New York Times. It’ll mean the end of Gannett, the end of CNN, the end of People. Had Alterman focused on a war between all media (including the trashy and disreputable bits) and all blogs, the picture he’d have drawn would have been much different. The Burlington Free Press doesn’t have people on the ground in Iraq; it’s the very rare journalistic organ that can afford that. If we’re comparing HuffPo to the major media, why not compare it to the average newspaper, rather than (arguably) the best one?

6. Alterman gives short shrift to the history of newspapers. He mentions that early in the history of the Republic, newspapers unashamedly represented the voice of a particular political party. Only in the 20th century did we end up with a quasi-professionalized body of non-specialists called “journalists” with pretensions of objectivity. Seems odd not to linger on this detail. What it says to me is that in the history of the media, the particular mode we’ve been operating in is a flash in the pan. (Likewise: songs printed onto millions of circular media and relentlessly marketed. Another thought for another time.) Had Alterman played up this aspect of The End Of Media, it would instead be The End Of A Blip. Which is hardly news.

That’s about it for now. The whole piece just pissed me off, and today’s bit of New York Times black-hole nonsense just put me over the edge.

What troubles me is that whenever I find a piece in the New Yorker that touches on something I know well, they mess it up. I wonder if I should subscribe to the New York Review of Books or something and see if it does the job any better.