The parasitic blogEric Alterman has a detailed assessment of the tie that binds newspapers and blogs in this week’s New Yorker. The Nation-blogger, prof and journo, known for his books on the media, democracy, and Bruce Springsteen, takes us back to the 1920's, the great days of Walter Lippman and John Dewey’s battle over how engaged the public really can be in democracy. As Alterman writes, “Lippman identified a fundamental gap between what we naturally expect from democracy and what we know to be true about people.” He called the average American a “deaf spectator in the back row” and essentially said that politics and society was, for the most part, too complex for the plain folk and that the newspapers that dared wade into its nuance would never get it right. We’re only good at reporting “the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch.”
Touche.
In 1927, Dewey attacked Lippman’s tome “Public Opinion,” with one of his own, “The Public and Its Problems,” in which he contends the commoners must be involved debaters on the issues of the day. Those dialogues would cut a greater path toward consensus and maybe truth. Of course, as Alterman says, “Dewey’s confidence in democracy rested in significant measure on his ‘faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished.’”
So are newspapers, blogs, and comment sections the proper conditions? Has the Internet brought about a more educated and mentally astute public, or is it just providing a place for the more ambitious, mouthy, and vitriolic among us to spout off?
Alterman doesn’t really answer that, but he does point out that most blogs are parasitically dependent on newspapers, which are, in turn, fading in quality. Readership of newspapers may be declining among the general audience, but you can bet it’s rising among bloggers. The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and dare we mention our local rag the Chron, are all primary sources for the blogs people actually do read – whether to echo and snark the daily news or report an alternate version of events. Without them, what would the blogs have to say? Where would they even begin? Few have newsroom staffs, though many are starting to recruit from the storehouse of laid-off reporters and editors.
Alterman supposes we may be steering back toward a model from an earlier era in American democracy, when papers really were rather partisan, with few apologies. But, he writes, “The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of ‘news’ – and each with its own set of ‘truths’ upon which to base debate and discussion – will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of ‘facts’ by which to conduct our politics.”
Couldn’t that be a good thing? Consider the “national narrative” right now: George W. Bush won the 2000 and 2004 elections, fair and square; presidential impeachment is “off the table”; the country is teetering on recession….and yet…and yet… facts to counter all of that exist. How do you define recession when millions of people are losing their homes, people who’ve been homeless for a long time continue to sleep and starve on the streets, the cost of living has increased dramatically while wages are spent before they’re collected? What is the real American story right now? Who is and isn’t telling it?
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