The New Media--Three Thousand Miles Wide and an Inch Deep?
Greg and I will just have to disagree about whether the economic collapse did more to doom McCain's candidacy than the nomination of Sarah Palin. (Though while we are on the subject of V for Viral I have to personally plead guilty to sending everyone I know of voting age a link to this video which I'm also saving till 2012 just in case....)
And I'm glad to see the shout out to Tina Fey. My decidedly unscientific sense is that SNL's skewering of Palin probably cost the GOP 3 states. And though for those of us outside the range of NBC's transmitters the internet made it possible to savor the skit again (and again and again), I'm not sure SNL really counts as new media.
So instead I want to pick up on the question of whether, by sweeping past the MSM gatekeepers, the new media really does push not just political coverage but politics itself in a more democratic direction.
Greg makes a powerful argument that it can--which gets some very strong back up from this report from CJR, where they seem to have taken my advice from 20 years ago to "get off the bus." It was one of their citizen journalists who broke "Bittergate," candidate Obama's unguarded riff about white working class resentment. But reading through the project's achievements left me wondering whether 24/7 surveillance is the same as journalism--and whether sending a warm of untrained citizen monitors (or recruiting a horde of unvetted, and possibly biased, citizen informants) is really going to ever give you more than a much more finely grained image of the surface of events.
As someone whose deepest prejudice is that news is something someone doesn't want you to know about, I remain skeptical that the new media will develop either the resources to allow real investigative reporting (rather than the kind of piggy-back parasitism on the MSM that we see so often) or the expertise, and sustained attention, to do the kind of digging that goes beyond a Google (or Youtube) search. Back in 1992 I worried: "We treat the culture war as a sideshow, when in our system it's really the main event. We report a great deal about the individual candidates, and next to nothing about the interests they represent. We write a length on the candidates' attacks, and hardly at all on the underlying conflicts which shape our political choices. " It would be pretty to think the new media was the answer, but so far I'm not convinced.
I must disagree. Half an inch.
March 6, 2009 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
It seems weird to read here that you doubt if there will be any "real investigative reporting" in the new media, when it was TPM (Josh) that broke the US attorney scandal story, using the sort of group-investigation that is unique to new media.
There was also his work on SS privatization, very effectively investigating and outing the legislators that were behind it, and not just reporting on it, but effectively ending the effort (along with many other new media outlets).
And you can't ignore Marcy Wheeler's work on the Plame scandal, or her subsequent work on FISA, torture memos, al-Haramain, etc. I'm not aware of anyone in the "old media" doing the kind of legal analysis and timeline generation that she's doing over on Firedoglake.
Yes, there is plenty of parasitic re-reporting going on, and the new media isn't ready to replace the old, but as newspapers cut back on reporters the new media is all we're likely to be left with--television having long ago abandoned any investigative role beyond nail salon exposés.
March 6, 2009 12:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
So instead I want to pick up on the question of whether, by sweeping past the MSM gatekeepers, the new media really does push not just political coverage but politics itself in a more democratic direction.
It does. The gatekeepers are still chortling over how the Republicans are dominating the messaging on the stimulus, how the White House is overreaching by not stopping Rush and Steele, and how the cries of socialism and going Galt are paying off for a minority party.
All these beliefs are based in the MSM's own echo chamber inside the Beltway, but have been rejected by the electorate at large.
"Something someone doesn't want you to know about" is a great description, but perhaps you hadn't foreseen that the "someone elses" already had media megaphones of their own.
March 6, 2009 1:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
For my clarification, please advise specifically what entities you are qualifying as MSM.
Thanks.
March 6, 2009 3:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
As to absence of context, I actually think some new media contributions do more to help provide it than most mainstream media reporting. Reporters rush about meeting filing deadlines on subjects they've just brushed up on.
Some of us, especially those who've been around awhile, have our memories jarred by relevant tidbits in these superficial accounts and sometimes have additional light to bring to them. Most reporters are long gone off to whatever they are supposed to be boning up on today. Internet sites where folks trade our tidbits then come along behind and contextualize the stories from multiple fragments -- and if we are lucky, some journalist carries what we've surfaced back into the so-called MSM.
March 6, 2009 4:35 PM | Reply | Permalink