This model stinks for countless reasons. But its most fundamental flaw is that bloggers will always be dismissed by their opponents as biased.

Well, our "objective" media have in recent years given us tons of unbiased, but clearly wrong stories—stories that served to justify some very, very bad policies that the Bush administration was pushing.  Still, the right wing cries about liberal bias the NY Times and Washington Post.

What do we stand to lose?

I don't see how blogs, as such, could ever replace the current media culture.  Hardly any blogs at all are involved in actual reporting, investigation and news gathering.  By comparison with an actual newspaper, a blog is like the op-ed pages alone, without all the other important stuff - it's about 2% of the total.

To the extent that blogs do report news, it generally consists in passing around links to stories that appear in more conventional news sources, or in some other way regurgitating that news and working it into an opinion piece.  Some blog-like entities, like Josh Marshall's, do break genuine news.  But that news is confined to a miniscule portion of the spectrum of what is important - it traffics in useful muckraking about Republican corruption and shenanigans, but that's it.

Unless people suddenly decide that they no longer need any actual information, and are happy simply discussing what they think rather than learning about what is happening, there will continue to be a demand for news, investigation and reporting.  Reporting at a high level often requires a level of organization and resources that are beyond the capacity of a blog.

If the blog culture does eventually lead to a transformation of the news business, it won't be blogs themselves to do the transforming, but some future evolution of blogs into more comprehensive sources of actual reportage.  Blogs are by and large not primary sources of information - they are places for discussion of new developments, not the place where the public knowledge of new developments originates and is first injected into the information stream.  Fora for discussion and debate are vital, and serve and important function in civil society.  But they serve an entirely different function than newspapers, which are mainly devoted to reportage.

What the US needs is a left-wing newspaper. There isn't one - certainly not the NYT or WP. There is no mass newspaper which provides a left-wing view on corporate power, the dominance of the rich in US politics, taxation, unions, US military power, Israel's colonisation in the occupied territories, the environment etc.

What the US left needs is an equivalent of the Guardian, even if it remains a minority paper, not to shore up the NYT. Interestingly, the Guardian was talking at one stage of launching a weekly newspaper in the US, I don't know what became of it.

The left has always, by definition, had less money and less access to business than the right, worldwide.

How has the left ever gotten anything done, and has anything really changed over the last 40 years?

As Matt has pointed out, over the last 40 years the left has achieved complete victory in nearly every major element of the left program of that time, and there is no new left program to replace it.

There is still healthcare, unionism and gay civil rights.  The left is well positioned to make breakthroughs there, except for unionism, over the next several election cycles, as usual against better funded opponents.

The form of the media will change but what is important is for the left to have a program that energizes its followers to beat better funded, better organized opponents as the left always has. 

What I am pretty sure about is that I would really hate to write for an outlet where I had to cloak my work in the rituals of objectivity rather than doing my best to tell the truth as I see it.

How does that even apply in either model?

Do you think of yourself as a "reporter"? Do you furnish "news"? Or do you interpret it?

In the 20th century American idea of "professional journalism," where there are even university programs to train reporters, you would not be employed as a "reporter," but as a "op-ed writer," "columnist," "pundit" or "analyst," and your work would be labeled as such....funny, I think there is some kind of big brouhaha about that going on right now about such labeling practices. Tis the reason I thought it odd that a blogger was complaining about "reporters" demeaning their reputation of striving for objectivity by appearing on a pundit panel. :-)

Mho, blogging has not chosen which it wants yet, it wishes not to chose. It wishes to criticize the objective model when it does not work out for their Fleet Street point of view, and to defend it when it does. "The news media," never even got a chance to fully develop the model of "professional journalism" introduced in the mid-20th century, where there is an attempt to separate reporting and opinion in a scholarly manner, and to make "reporting" a profession subject to ethical standards similar to those in scholarship, scientific research, et. al. Before that, the U.S.A. had the "Fleet Street" model, like everyone else, and it is what the First Amendment mainly addresses). It was blindsided by the popularity of talk radio, and "investigative" advocacy like "60 Minutes," the straight-out advocacy model. When that happened, stuff like this happened: producers of network news were cut from budgets that allowed them to cover what they the public ought to know, like Cronkite was able to, and made them instead pay for themselves, to be profitable enough to pay their own salaries. They had to abandon the model and go for the opinion, the inflammatory, the "hot." No more boring non-profit type "professional" stuff; the consuming public doesn't give a damn about the activities of those rebels in Tasmania.

Bloggers, right and left are now doing similar to the newspapers that talk radio did to broadcast. Currently most of the "news media" are mainly getting the message: drop the objectivity project; A.P. and Reuters is enough, that's all the public will support, let's do opinion. Why do you think NYTimes columnists were judged the safest bet to put on paid subscription? Meanwhile someone like Ted Koppel or Aaron Brown just shrugs and walks off into the sunset, thinking: it's going to be hopeless for a while.

The idea, the model of striving for objectivity, the Socratic method, has become the enemy in the current climate. The Post Modernists have one. All is narrative, whether you identify yourself as a narrative writer or not.

p.s. Murdoch is still the one who best understands what is the coolest right now.

Swapping journalism for career bureaucracies, this is the same question as raised by MY's What's a law between partisan allies? post.

In both cases, the left/democrats (I know, I know) are tempted to look for political success from 'neutral sources', 'expertise', 'professionalism', whether the NYT or the career professionals of the Justice department. That will never work, in part because experts disagree and in part because politics determines who one considers an expert in the first place. What the left needs in the US is more partisan allies, both in government and the press.

I don't see how blogs, as such, could ever replace the current media culture. Hardly any blogs at all are involved in actual reporting, investigation and news gathering. By comparison with an actual newspaper, a blog is like the op-ed pages alone, without all the other important stuff - it's about 2% of the total.

I have to disagree with this to some extent. Bloggers have proven themselves to be superior researchers and collators of facts in evidence in many instances. It manifestly was not mainstream media that kept up the pressure on issues like Social Security, torture, prisoner abuse, and "Plamegate."

Increasingly, what is sometimes denominated "old media" has demonstrated a marked unwillingness to do plain old grunt work -- aka research. Stories that require depth of understanding just don't grab pseudo-reporters like Judith Miller.

It's not that newspapers and magazines are going to disappear, but that only pressure from the so-called blogosphere will keep any of them from fading further into the category of purveyors of advertising with an occasional "human interest" story interspersed.

The evidence of their failing business model is plain in the falling circulations. The arrogance and dishonesty of their shilling for government and business has permanently damaged them all. Why would I trust either the reporting or the op-ed of people who not only brought us WMD but are deploying the likes of Bob Woodward as "reporters" and whining about the name of an online column because the government doesn't like it?

Blogs provide me with my daily information. The Nation and The Economist provide me with analysis. The local newsrag provides me with starter for the fireplace.

mp

The problem with newspapers at the moment is twofold. On the one hand, publicly owned newspapers are being subjected to investor pressure that is, frankly, insane -- Knight Ridder's papers were making above average earnings -- in comparison to, say, your average tech company -- and they were still bombed by the investment community, i.e. small but powerful hedge funds and the like, who wanted essential cuts and ever more impossible earnings. The question for newspapers, to my mind, is whether they are the kinds of companies that can exist as publicly traded entitites. Unlike tech companies, newspapers have to produce a new product every day. That is a pace that investors don't understand. It isn't like fastfood, and those guys want it to be like fastfood.  Great newspapers seem, perhaps not coincidentally, to be privately owned. The second problem, for the liberal metropolitan papers like the NYT, the LAT, and the WP, is that their client base is liberal, but the people who are the opinion makers on these papers have more personal interest in maintaining their positions in the powersphere. The recent dust up at the WP about Froomkin is a great example -- here's a man who rallies traditional customers, and the editors shit on him in the paper. Imagine McDonald's executives - to continue the fast food analogy -- coming out against children. I think that the great newspapers forget that they are working in a business instead of scoring in the status sweepstakes, and the investors in publicly traded newspapers don't understand the business. Add to that that the editors of newspapers have a really curious idea about the net -- I believe Harris, in his Q and A at the Washington post today, called it the cranksphere -- and you get a picture of an industry that no longer understands the landscape -- rather like the big three TV channels confronting cable.
 

And, while conservatives would like to treat the Times and the Post this way, they can't.

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A typical blog comment and complaint is of the form: here is some important fact that no one is reporting.

But it usually turns out that the fact was actually uncovered and disclosed by some more or less conventional reporter, writing for a newspaper or magazine.  What the complainer really means is that the fact is not getting wide play in the major mainstream media.  And sometimes all they mean is that it is not getting play on television news, particularly on the cable channels.

Now I agree that blogs do play an important role in disseminating important news.  But it is still fairly rare that a blogger is the untimate source of that news.  The role of blogs in the dissemination process is to pick up a report from a conventional media source, and then accelerate it through the blogosphere.  An advantage that blogs have over conventional media in disseminating news is that blog dissemination is driven much more directly by what people are actually interested in knowing.  Conventional journalism, even when conducted with the highest integrity and regard for informing the public, is driven by some editor's guess at what people want to know, or by their value judgments about what people should know.  I suspect that it is this limitation on the conventional practice which is so frustrating to many journalists, and the source of their envy.

And of course, conventional news in our society is governed by a variety of external pressures from advertizing, corporate control and structure, and governmental pressures.

Much of the animus toward the media is directed at the the cable news stations.  But it seems to me that some of these complaints about the American media are just displaced anger at Americans themselves.  The cable stations sell a watered down news product, diluted with lots of catering to popular prejudices and conventional opinions, and with a good deal of entertainment thrown in.  But they are able to sell it because there is a huge audience for it.  The problem is that a lot of Americans want to watch that crap.

And, as in many other areas, Americans are generally willing to exchange quality for low cost.  Instead of paying for news gathering themselves through higher subscription costs, they are willing to accept an inferior product that is provided for free or at a very low cost - via the advertisers.

In a century where sub-national and trans-national forces will increasingly shape the daily lives of people more than the politics and policies of national governments, national cultures - including national news media organizations - will play an increasingly less important role in shaping both the way that we see the world, and the policies affecting it. This isn't the nineteenth century, when nation-states and national cultures were still in ascendance, and whether the press is partisan and ideological or hegemonically "objective" it won't matter as much.

Anyone untalented enough and stupid enough to write for The New Republic (I remember when that magazine was actually good, back before that @#$^%$#@!#@#^%^%$$#@@!!  bought it in the 80s) is undeserving of being worried about.  Does anyone worry about what their 2-year old says in the middle of a tantrum? 

I'm not sure why you had to mar an otherwise excellent post with this gratuitous swipe at something called "PostModernists," some boegy like Bill O'Reilly's "liberals." It's not true that the search for truth is a phantom, not if people are searching for it.  Truth itself is a phantom.  Likewise, it's not true that if truth is a phantom then everyone is lying, because lies only become lies by contradistinction to truth. 
What's particularly ironic (I won't say symptomatic) is that to conclude an argument in favor of striving for objectivity (not achieving, I don't think you say, but striving, which is to say that a state of pure objectivity is a chimera yet the attempt at objectivity has an ethical value w whether or not it can be achieved) by plastering on "PostModernists" this preposterous purported position.  I've heard the occasional historian say, "I can't agree with the "PostModernists" because I think things actually happen."  I like it when they say such things, because then I know whom not to listen to.  Ask one of them to name a source for the argument and they sputter and drool.  (Oh, sure, you can no doubt find some people who call themselves "PostModernists" (capital M and all) who say that, but I can find you people who call themselves Democrats and say more asinine things, but you'd rightlyprotest if I used them synecdochically for the Democrats.)
The truth, dear Art (for whom I take this time in reply because I do respect your writing on this site), s that history is and always has been narrative.  Even someone as safe and unPostModern as Hayden White wrote two very good books decades ago about the narrative basis of history, which is to say that events happen and become facts, but that facts ae only meaningful within theories, and ultimately in history, the theories (White calls them "metahistory") are about the course of history.
To understand events and history objectively is easy, all we have to do is to see history whole.  So where do I buy my ticket for Archimedes so that I might comprehend it from an objective distance.  Well, we could turn to Aristotle and say that an event is something with a beginning, middle, and an end, those borders being defined as the points before and after which nothing important happens.  There are, however, two problems with that definition.  The first is that it is taken from The Poetics, thus it returns us to storytelling.  The second is ever getting a consensus on that counts as beginnings and ends.
If we can get consensus, we have objectivity.  They're the same.  That, as Kuhn showed so well these many years ago, is how our most objective endeavor works, as a matter of what account is most compelling.

Conclusion by fiat. This part is unquestionable:

The evidence of their failing business model is plain in the falling circulations.

The arrogance and dishonesty of their shilling for government and business has permanently damaged them all. Why would I trust either the reporting or the op-ed of people who not only brought us WMD but are deploying the likes of Bob Woodward as "reporters" and whining about the name of an online column because the government doesn't like it?

Bloggers and blogonauts are flattering themselves to think they have anything but the most peripheral impact on newspaper circulations. Newspapers are failing because of commoditization information, and there's a lot lower ad density on the internet than there was in print papers. TV made it hard enough to get readers, and those who were dedicated to reading news rather than watching a face recite it now have so many free choices (and less free time) that it's awfully hard to justify buying a paper in print edition. Why buy the Post in print when I can get the Post, the Times and every other newspaper in the world online, for free, with unobstrusive ads?

Like you, I'm underwhelmed by the quality of recent political reporting, but I'm not convinced that blogs are really a MSM-killer or that they offer a true replacement.

Realistically, if John Smith reads every day how immigrants are flooding the country and going to wreck the public schools he might start thinking about immigration controls too.

Realistically, the anti-immigrant right does not get as much of a hearing in maintream newspapers because the corporate right loves immigration because it drives dopwn wages and proivides them with cheap maids and gardeners.