T.S. Elliot has a verse in the "Four Quartets" that goes something like "humankind cannot bear too much reality."

He also struggles in the poem with how anyone can try to write about reality, which is always moving. He writes: "Words strain,/crack and sometimes break, under the burden,/under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/will not stay still."

Can't find the exact quote about reality at the moment, but the entire poem may bear rereading right now. Another line: "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless." (that's from memory only)

Trying to be in reality, to cope with it, that's the task of mystics, of philosphers, of therapy. Gargantuan. We are all struggling here.

I wish I could say more at the moment. But maybe this helps somehow.

Posted by: Mary Ann at October 23, 2004 4:46 PM | Permalink

Jay,
Surely much of the difficulty comes from how the source of reality production is both the site and the object of the propaganda wars. A propaganda war is precisely a battle of competing master narratives, over how to map the territory.

The corporate media/Iraq as colonialism view is one master narrative. From this perspective, the Republican party is the party of militant deregulation, cartelization, and the promotion of imperialism. The Democratic party is the party of responsible, internationally minded promotion of US power. The Keynesian compromise with capital rather than the neo-liberal mainlining of the pure stuff. On the corporate media model, Thomas Friedman's "one dollar equals one vote" thesis from the Lexis and the Olive Tree is a transparent confession that owners and shareholders do and should rule the rest of us.

A second master narrative gives more credit to technology: The media is disoriented by the new media landscape and frequently can't even recognize its own enlightened self-interest. Republican talk radio, the right wing echo chamber, and media recentralization in the guise of deregulation, have pulled us back toward a 19th C. economic model with 21st C. technology at its disposal. Jon Stewart's Daily Show parodies the hapless dinosaur quality of mainstream media political coverage's move toward info-tainment even as it frames this pap as ultimately a self-marginalization for the sake of ratings. From Stewart's view, the MSM has effectively become the servant of the ruling political party because all it cares about is entertainment and profits rather than the public welfare. It is in this accidental respect that the MSM becomes a tool of the Republicans from Stewart's perspetive.

The third master narrative is the Agnew/Buchanan (his speech writer) thesis: Liberal elites trample the preferences of the silent majority by distorting the public discourse in favor of the traitorous values of a ruling elite that mysteriously works its magic unaffected by Republican control of all branches of government. If the fourth estate is discredited, there will be no site from which to question the imaginary data Bush Republicanism runs on and uses to legitimize continued control of all branches of government. Obviously this general offensive goes back decades, transcends any one candidate, and was originally more ideologically coherent than the scattershot series of quid-pro-quos (health insurance relief for business that doesn't relieve anyone else, for instance) and wedge issues Bush and Rove have chosen to rule and run on.

Each of these theses in turn has a take on the war in Iraq. The domestic propaganda war situates the wartime propaganda claims of the Vietnam war that shaped the culture wars to begin with.

For the corporate media view, Iraq is one more colony, albeit a break from the Democratic party's use of international law FOR colonial purposes. From the second master narrative, Bush's colonialism is illegitimate because it has despised the Cold War structure that made international law do the work of US colonialism. It has broken the Cold War diplomatic machine Kerry has to put back in place. The Agnew/Buchanan culture wars thesis says the US has to kick ass to get respect, then capitulation, then peace, in that order. The slightest hint of humanity in the meantime will encourage would be challengers to US hegemony. The Project for a New American Century calls for eliminating all potential rivals BEFORE THEY ACTUALLY BECOME RIVALS. It is actually an argument for policing international thought crimes, i.e. the temerity to oppose the US in any matter, for any reason. In that respect, they are perfectly consistent in taking out Saddam Hussein because he possessed the intention of opposing the US someday, someway. You don't need actual WMD to commit thought crimes against the US.

There isn't ONE master narrative to describe the ground war because the ground war is precisely a battle over what will prevail as the master narrative and who will be recognized as possessing the authority to legitimate it. All of these things are up for grabs at the moment. And each advocate of each alternative master narrative is a player as well as an interpreter. Who do you love?

Posted by: Ben Franklin at October 23, 2004 4:48 PM | Permalink

This year has been a challenge for "objective" and "neutral" media-types because so much of the discourse is based on raw emotion, mostly hate, and it is hard to report on emotion. It seems people, with TOO much information at their fingertips, seem inclined to seek out knowledge to reinforce their emotion, hence the rise of the blog and the credibility of bloggers. It almost seems like the creature of Bush-bashing is feeding on itself.

Of course the mainstream media is assaulted on both sides of the aisle claiming "bias." This ploy doesn't seem to be as clever as it used to, I hope, people see that is a diversion tactic to steer the electorate away from the real issues. The CBS-Rathergate fiasco is a great example -- the Bush team was able to spin the story away from the President's service record and on to the authenticity of the actual documents.

Professor Rosen, I too feel like I'm a click away from drowing in the dirty waters of Election coverage.

Posted by: Dan at October 23, 2004 4:56 PM | Permalink

Maybe you should visit PIPA's (The Program on International Policy Attitudes) site, www.pipa.org and look at their new study of the differing perceptions of Bush and Kerry supporters. The results explains at least for me many strange things in American politics

Posted by: TSarkka at October 23, 2004 5:31 PM | Permalink

Its not the world that's changing faster; it's always been incomprehensibly complicated. As Ben Franklin aptly notes above, its the narratives which we use to simplify and make sense of the world that are multiplying and diverging.

Paradoxically, that makes things more complicated, especially for someone whose job it is to understand and compare all the narratives. The obvious solution is to pick one ideology and slip into it like a warm bath. So soothing. So... simple.

Posted by: Andy at October 23, 2004 6:16 PM | Permalink

Jon not John Stewart

I've found the same thing - there's a lot of shit flung at us. We're spending a lot of time ducking and still trying to see what's ahead of us.

Posted by: Temple Stark at October 23, 2004 7:00 PM | Permalink

I just read that PIPA report. What stood out for me was this sentence: "To remain loyal and bonded to him (i.e. bush) means to enter into this false reality."

Reminds me of victims of abuse. Must be what happens in a dictatorship. Think of Stockholm syndome, where a captive takes on the perspective of captors (Patty Hearst, for example).

May be "soothing" and "simple" but it bodes ill. Think of "Hitler's Willing Executioners."

I'm a therapist, not a journalist, but what is going on now makes it hard to feel I can shut the door of the "consulting room." Psychopathology trickling down from the top, seeping into the society. Very worrisome.

Posted by: Mary Ann at October 23, 2004 7:45 PM | Permalink

Technological change has always had profound social consequences, but few inventions in history have caused more political and cultural change than movable type printing. Before Gutenberg, "truth" and "history" were largely properties of the Christian Church (and there was only one Christian Church, then).

Movable type printing took away control over "the truth" from the Church and placed it in the hands of a secular elite.

Now the Internet is taking away that secular elite's control over "the truth" and giving it to the broad populus.

That's the connection. Everything you listed is a side effect of that fundamental change.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 23, 2004 7:48 PM | Permalink

"Why periods of intense partnership coincide with high involvement" - do you mean partisanship, and political involvement?

Posted by: Dell Adams at October 23, 2004 8:19 PM | Permalink

Yes, partisanship. Jon not John Stewart. Thanks.

TS: I added that PIPA study to my list. Thanks.

Andy: Part of my "distress" is that if I slip into a partisan skin almost all the problems on my list disappear-- as puzzles, I mean. So yes, "the obvious solution is to pick one ideology and slip into it." I guess I don't like to be that obvious. Plus, it's another way of saying: spin is all there is.

Steven: Thanks for that nugget. "The Internet is taking away that secular elite's control over 'the truth' and giving it to the broad populus." I do see that happening. That we're in a Gutenberg moment explains a lot. But I also think power is up some new tricks with Truth too. That means the people in power are.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at October 23, 2004 9:19 PM | Permalink

This is about feedback systems and how short the relaxation phase between output and the next input has become. This is about the skills people have to manage that input. This is about how schools only casually teach tools for thought.

This is pressing, but not intractable. Fortunately, new metaphors and examples make theaching this stuff easier than it used to be.

Posted by: sbw at October 23, 2004 9:53 PM | Permalink

BTW, Before you get carried away with the PIPA Report, the phrasing of the questions was directive. Different questions would have led elsewhere. Similarly directive questions to Democrats would have had an equally perverse effect.

Posted by: sbw at October 23, 2004 9:56 PM | Permalink

I would characterize this as a Luther moment, not a Gutenberg moment. 95,000 bloggers are nailing their complaints on the doors of the main stream media cathedrals.

The Church didn't want to lose control, and it fought back. The secular elite also don't want to lose control, and they're fighting back too.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 23, 2004 9:56 PM | Permalink

I think several here, particularly Steven, are on the right track, but there is a convergence effect here.

1. As we near the tipping point for online publishing adoption (usage and creation), the information flow is being rapidly democratized. But, nature abhors a vacuum, and the market wants some order to the data flow. (Face it, unlimited information is almost as uselss as no information.) Which brings us to the second point...

2. Like many industries do over time, the traditional media market has passed maturity and entered decline. It is largely coincidental that this has happened just as the technological democratization above bears fruit. That condition has created a perfect storm that has the market practically screaming for a revolution.

And the Luther analogy has been done:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/100504B.html

Posted by: Peg at October 23, 2004 10:06 PM | Permalink

What a wonderful list of ideas! (If you were like most bloggers, you wouldn't care about how these concepts fit together.) It sounds like you are about to write an extremely interesting article, and I can't wait to read it.

Posted by: shrinkette at October 23, 2004 10:12 PM | Permalink

Jay,
I linked to the PIPA report yesterday. I'm curious why it didn't register.

I'm assuming it has something to do with rhetorical style. Perhaps I framed it as ideology rather than explanation and you found that uninteresting ("Just as SBVT defends an imaginary Vietnam war, Republicans support an imaginary Bush")?

But can we really read it any other way? This is no big thing, it just piqued my curiosity.

Posted by: Ben Franklin at October 23, 2004 10:21 PM | Permalink

I read it yesterday. You were the third person who told me about it. But I forgot to add it to this post until it was mentioned here.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at October 23, 2004 10:34 PM | Permalink

Steven de Beste is making the McLuhan/Eisenstein media shifts as technologically driven argument, master narrative #2. This is basically a more historically deep version of the Thomas Friedman, F.A. Hayek argument about neo-liberalism and globalization, that it distributes and decenters knowledge.

Yet your comments also point to a way in which this master narrative of decentered power operates to further CONSOLIDATE the power of certain elites. "But I also think power is up some new tricks with Truth too. That means the people in power are."

Does technology really explain this? Or is it simply one condition of possibility? I'd say the latter. Elites can't be taking further control in the name of democratizing technology without technological change, but that change alone doesn't mean they can or will succeed. In fact it runs counter to the globalization/ neo-liberal/ communications revolution narrative of broader empowerment.

There is an empowerment of the people effect accompanied by institutional consolidation and centralization that the technological change argument not only doesn't account for, but actively interferes with our ability to see.

Posted by: Ben Franklin at October 23, 2004 10:36 PM | Permalink

Jay, here's a reordering of your list, tweaked. I matched them in a table here. This order may be a useful jumping off point:

The Net explosion is changing the relationship between people and news.[5] It has caused bloggers to have a role in politics and a significant effect on the press.[4] Distributed knowledge has enabled both amateur and professional bloggers, blurring brand.[7] The effect, is to enable real-time checking of main stream media, which journalism is only just beginning to appreciate.[2]

Scandals exposed by online real-time checking, exacerbated by the media's reluctance to concede the points has caused brand erosion.[1] This, in turn, has made readers and viewers wonder if there ever was a neutral observer and a disinterested account.[17]

The result is a cynical mistrust of mainstream media[3] that can be played upon by commenting entertainers like Jon Stewart who is credible simply because he mirrors the critical observations of viewers.[9]

Jon Stewart presages, if not a collapse, of traditional authority in journalism,[6] at least a weakening of it, requiring a change to improve, or it will face being replaced.

The crumbling of traditional authority has diminished journalists' influence as arbitors between candidates differing statements. This, combined with the extra channels of communication provided by the Net, have encouraged "He said, she said, we said" and made it such an issue this year.[10] The opportunity for many voices has encouraged the entrance of new players of all kinds in presidential campaigning.[8]

The Net makes some things easier. Argument is participatory[16], accentuating the political divide and its passions[12], its very expression drawing greater attention to the cultural war, even drawing in the mainstream press,[13] galvanizing partisans to action.[14]

The net also makes easier propaganda and the intensity of its practice in 2004[15] can happen, but if we respond to it quickly next time, the same technology can ameliorate it to a degree.

Meanwhile, the medium allows an easy increase in noise such that red herrings like one political aide's comment can be elevated to seriousness, as in the "reality-based community" thesis and the Bush Administration[11] or a poll describing the ostensible the separate realities of Bush and Kerry supporters[18] with peculiar phrasing can, if believed, possibly draw a few votes.

Posted by: sbw at October 24, 2004 12:12 AM | Permalink

Ben, Steven, Jay: Cuius regio, eius religio.

Posted by: Dell Adams at October 24, 2004 1:34 AM | Permalink

I would venture to say most of the distrust of media goes back at least 30-40 years. So we can't chalk up the distrust itself to the new media.

Jon Stewart and the Daily Show are new media in the sense that cable allowed viewpoints beyond the three broadcast networks to get broader exposure, and, like Fox, the Comedy Channel finally allowed expression of a long and widely held disgust with the sixth grade level of so much media coverage, for example the weekend Washington journalists roundup that seemed like such a pathetic and clueless little club of navel gazers.

C-SPAN and CNN were both revolutionary because they displaced the press and the broadcast networks as primary sources of news, especially in Washington. We could now watch a congressional hearing or debate on a bill and then read the surreal misdescription of it in the press based on what we saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears.

That is the kind of experience that leads to a loss of mainstream media authority and credibility--because it often no longer serves the function of primary source that once allowed it to claim that authority and credibility. The internet has magnified that displacement by enabling more competing sources of information and more possibilities for expression of alternative narratives.

That leaves editorializing as a potential niche not covered by CNN or C-SPAN and yet it has explicitly attempted to distance itself from what seems to be the only useful function they might by embracing the view from nowhere understanding of their function. So part of what is happening is the mainstream pretending to tell you about what you have already seen and know about from other sources (in even more detail with the internet). So the joke is on them because they still imagine they are bringing you raw data when they are actually telling you the third or fourth version of a story if you follow news seriously. The Fox approach is logical in this sense in that it recognizes its place in the media infrastructure--it is not informing you, it is bringing you the added value of Republican-friendly editing and newscopy that C-SPAN doesn't perform for you (although CNN increasingly does what it can).

Still, it is important to remember that the Agnew/Buchanan strategy won elections in 1972 and 1980 and 1984 as well as the congressional elections in 2002 (with Bush running away from it in 2000, compassionate conservatism, etc.). Perhaps we need to consider more carefully what hasn't changed as well as what has.

The Democrats have lost institutional control of Congress for one important change. The Democratic party tyranny thesis has lost a central aspect of the historical situation that once made it plausible.

The claims for elite liberal conspiracy have shifted from government to media because the challenge to the right from federal and state government has largely been contained. So we have a strikingly consistent, continuous strategy of forty years with the focus more exclusive shifted to the media.

Now the web offers yet another new media platform for execution of the tried and true strategy previously conducted through direct mail and sped up by cable but now directed exclusively at the media rather than ALSO at the media.

Posted by: Ben Franklin at October 24, 2004 2:08 AM | Permalink

What a provocative list! Certainly all of us feel overwhelmed right now.

A couple of observations first: I am fascinated that the best "news" this year is from comedians: Jon Stewart, Air America, Garrison Keillor, the Onion. It seems to me that the key to your puzzle lies in the comic mind. Psychologists propose two main theories of humor. Freud argued that we laugh at what makes us anxious (so we laugh at jokes about bad things about to happen to others, eg.) Others propose that humor arises from incongruity--from discrepancy between two concepts or objects. For example, we laugh when the Onion has headlines such as "Documents reveal gaps in Bush's service as President" or "Cheney vows to attack America if Kerry wins." Why are these funny?

A second comment, from a different angle altogether: Psychologist Robert Kegan proposed (in "In over Our Heads)stages of human consciousness, analogous to Piaget's stages of cognitive development. At each stage there is a reorganization of reality to accommodate greater complexity. A small child is egocentric--s/he views everything from his or her point of view. They can't take the point of view of another. In the middle stages we adopt the POV of our tribe--we can describe the characteristics and behavior of our tribe and how we fit or do not fit into the tribe, but we don't really have a good understanding of the Other group. At the highest (postmodern) stage we can see ourselves and the members of our groups objectively and can compare the characteristics and behavior of our group with that of others.

Comedians are effective when they can operate at the level of the post-modern mind--Kegan's top stage--spotting the inconsistent and absurd in the characteristics and behavior of our group. I'll get back to this shortly.

I see three underlying factors in your list. Competing worldviews, disruptive technologies and "telling the meta-story".
So what connects the items on your list? I would start with the complexity of the modern environment (by which I mean everythng in our lives not trees.) This complexity is challenging American's ability to keep up. Key features are the rapid pace of change, massive migration of people & overpopulation, the dying out of the Western culture, environmental degradation/resource depletion the media and communication technology. At an intellectual and material level, we live in a society of excess: We deal with complexity, strangers, too many choices, loss of community and so on. In addition, much of our experience is mediated through films and TV: We carry vivid memories of things that we have not experienced first hand. We all saw the Twin Towers fall, but for New Yorkers, it was real; for me it was a horrific reality TV show.

It seems to me that it is not a coincidence that Kerry support comes from the parts of the country that are best educated and most densely populated. These are people who have had the most experience dealing with the "Other" and complexity. Bush support comes from the traditional rural heartland. If you look at the bubble that surrounds Bush you can get a sense of how he is stuck in that middle stage of cognitive development. But, of course, neither GWB nor his followers think that they are out of touch with reality. But because they don't have a well-developed sense of other groups, their representations of those groups is fictional, the stuff of fantasy and fairy tale. So, you get culture wars between those who have accommodated the extreme diversity of the modern world, are more fact based, and know more, and those who still live in their tribal group unchallenged by the other except in their fantasies and on TV. Bush or Cheney just make stuff up, and their believers don't question them, because they live in a created reality which involves a fusion of what they see on TV, their everyday experience and their imagination.

So you get arguments over who gets to tell the "story." If the media tell the story so it makes sense to metro people, the traditionalists feel outraged--why is the media not telling the created reality. And vice versa. So everyone attacks the media for not telling their story.

Furthermore, the internet allows a level of communication and expertise that simply wasn't possible in 1990. The old linear, hierarchical narrative that was permitted by books and in which the modern media grew up no longer applies. In a book, you read from the thesis through the evidence and conclusions, and the author was an expert, and s/he controlled the narrative. Only a few were priviledged enough to be authors. The media adopted that model--they were the experts, we sat through their reports. The media, much of it, has grown irrelevant because they are still using the old hierarchical model, but they have grown decadent over the past decade: They have become entertainers, parroting events to sell papers & ad time, celebrities rather than expert. However, today we use parallel processing--hyperlinks and blogs. We take in smaller bits of info, synthesize more sources, are more visual and everyone has a shot at being an expert. So we can all go off to our bloglands and bitch about those we disagree with. Yet, the opinions of a Rush Limbaugh is equated with the opinions of an expert. We have lost our way to evaluate and compare factual, realistic, substantiated arguments from emotional, fictional claims. Conservatives have been embracing emotional, fictional claims--creating their own reality--beause they have not been able to keep up with the reality.

The media has been stuck in an old paradigm. The reason comedians seem to be telling the best story this year is because they alone are trained to tell the "meta-story"-to step outside and name the discrepancies between the word and the deed. The media in the past several weeks--since the 2nd debate--seem to be adapting and learning to tell the meta-story.

Sorry for the length of this. I see what you mean about no short answers!

Posted by: PTate in MN at October 24, 2004 4:44 AM | Permalink

sbw, could you offer some examples of questions, or phrasings of questions, that might result in as perverse an effect on Kerry supporters as you think the PIPA survey did on Bush supporters, or could you rephrase the PIPA questions in a way that you think wouldn't have produced that effect?

Jay, if you haven't already you should take a look at the recent CCJ survey of its members' opinions of the election coverage this year.

The unsurprising consensus is that the coverage sucks, and the narrative ends plaintively: "The larger question in many ways is why, if these concerns are raised campaign after campaign, the press seems unable to address or correct them."

I agree with sbw that the PIPA survey and the "reality-based community" paradigm don't really belong in your list, although my reasons are very different from his.

I think the web and blogging have altered the center of gravity in journalism in a couple of ways.

One is that as an institution, journalism is amnesiac; it doesn't hold on to memories much longer than the hero in Memento, and it's much less interested than he was in making the attempt. Bloggers armed with Google and huge hard drives are beginning to forcibly imbue the institution with a long-term memory. At some point, probably when a major player realizes it's easy, fun and profitable, the press will assume that responsibility themselves.

(As a horrid indication that the day may be long in coming, reference Bill Keller's remark that he hadn't really paid much attention to his paper's Iraq coverage before he got the executive editor's job, and didn't intend to look back; an admission that past isn't prologue for him.)

What may accelerate that process is that bloggers have become newsmakers. The press haven't for the most part done any better covering the upstart newsmakers than they have the traditional ones—there's still a bunch of unexplored territory on the CBS story, and while you can bet that some curious souls in academia and concerned ones in the corporate world are building detailed timelines and flow charts of the Sinclair boycott, I doubt that anyone at the Times or the Post is—but the reality is setting in.

A number of your concerns are, according to me, almost identical with one another. You've got a handful of largely psychological issues, among which I'd include the attraction of argument journalism, the connection between activity and intense partisanship, propaganda, the escalation in what amount to attacks upon the concept of journalism, and the culture wars pollution. None of these things are new, but I think all of them were greatly magnified in the wake of 911.

Then you have a handful of professional issues that I'd classify as self-inflicted wounds. Scandals and trust are intimately related. Erosion of authority is what happens when you're not authoritative, which relates to the "he said, she said" abdication of responsibility, which relates to the assaults on the notion of impartiality.

I'm not sure that political attacks on the press are escalating so much as that people are more responsive to them now, which loops back to the authority issue. The press are afraid to exercise their authority. They're afraid to accord this election the importance that people on both sides of the divide believe it deserves. They're afraid to make a call.

Jon Stewart seems more credible to many people because he is more credible. He actually says things we know the press are thinking but won't say, and he uses press figures such as Wolf Blitzer to highlight their own corruption. He popped Begala and Carlson on Crossfire like a couple of cheap balloons, and they're still screaming bloody murder about it. He's of limited value as a source of information, but he's a superb mirror.

The "reality-based community" and the PIPA survey are significant because they point up that a great many people in this country are, for all practical purposes, psychotic.

Posted by: weldon berger at October 24, 2004 7:16 AM | Permalink

PTate in MN:

I like what you're saying, but it doesn't just apply to humor. Creative work of any kind. Wisdom also. Good humor, to my mind, includes these other aspects. There's a playfulness and a wisdom at the same time. Making reality thereby more bearable?

I would add that the idea of different stages of cognitive development, as well as the generation of both new paradymes and true creativity, come about through a painful process, such as Jay described in his post. It's a process of holding paradoxes in mind. Tolerating the paradoxical - until some new synthesis is forged, some new vantage point.

Archimedes said he could move the world with a lever and a place to stand. Any one of us, going through these cognitive shifts - whether related to our particular profession, politics, the internet, our lives and relationships - we are all searching for that lever and that place to stand.

Amateurs or professionals (depends on where you're standing) and the idea of distributed knowledge versus credentialed expertise (perhaps the lever?)

But what we are really discussing here is who has the right to report events and generate social commentary. Well, on events we can trust our own eyes and ears and the internet allows us to contact people from all over the country and the world, thus having access to lots of raw data and filtering that based on our professional expertise (of whatever type), our cognitive stage, and our personhood. We're at the point where many of us are recognizing, gee... I have my own perspective and I want to share that.

Of course I too am overwhelmed by the deluge of data. I too need the help of reporters or experts to synthesize the information and provide background and commentary. But then my own mind goes to work!

I don't presume to tell you journalists how to do your job. But I've found to my suprise that I have an interest in what I now think of as political psychology. And I am intrigued by the questions being posed here and the efforts to track down the "truth" versus the "propaganda" in what we hear and read.

And I am bending my wits this way and that to try and comprehend the people who believe the "created reality" in spite of all the deluge of contrary facts as well as to keep up with the "reality-based" community of thinkers and fact finders, posting theses and doing activism and hoping for sanity to prevail.

And I say "Bravo!" And also, "I feel your pain."

Posted by: Mary Ann at October 24, 2004 7:35 AM | Permalink

Weldon Berger: sbw, could you offer some examples of questions, or phrasings of questions, that might result in as perverse an effect on Kerry supporters as you think the PIPA survey did on Bush supporters

Sure, here's one of many possibilities [Remember, this isn't trying to justify Bush or Kerry, but to call into question the PIPA poll phrasing]:

"Perceptions of the Duelfer Report... As you may know, Charles Duelfer, the chief weapons inspector selected by the Bush Administration to investigate whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, has just presented his final report to Congress. It it your impression he concluded that [Then substitute this comment]:"

Sanctions had been and likely would continue to be effective stifling Saddam's WMD ambitions.

---
Weldon, Duelfer's key findings, (Google it) actually found Saddam was actively undermining the sanctions and had conveyed to his lieutenents his continued interest in pursuit of WMD.

Posted by: sbw at October 24, 2004 10:33 AM | Permalink

Great list, and I agree with Shrinkette: Sounds like you're gestating the blog entry we're all waiting to read.

I think you can see one of the pivot points in Stewart's refusing to be CrossFire's "monkey": The journalists want to entertain and the entertain wants to tell the truth.

The entertainer is the pivot here because I think part of the new -- but transient -- narrative is that "The media are the last to know"...and in particular, the last to know that they've lost their pompous, false claim on our trust. "The media are the last to know" is a comic trope since, obviously, they're in the knowing business. Hence, the narrative has become comedic. Their every protestation of seriousness -- from Dan Rather's apology to Sam Donaldson's toupee -- now only makes them look more ridiculous.

(I wrote about this here.)

Posted by: David Weinberger at October 24, 2004 11:34 AM | Permalink

John Coulter must have missed a comment or two above aboutthe PIPA Poll. Someone want to explain to him that what was asked was to phrase a poll question that could just as easily lead Kerry supporters to believe something that was not necessarily true.

Posted by: sbw at October 24, 2004 1:42 PM | Permalink

The uproar in the conventional mass-media news is the result of the sin Stewart committed: He commented on the (news)kings' (lack of) sartorial splendor. As I discuss here, Stewart, in his role as court jester, is among the few conveying "The Truth": That which upsets the applecart.

But he also demonstrates another reality (also discussed in the above link): Both the end, and the beginning of mass media - "A mass medium was once thought of as one in which a mass of people experienced the same thing at the same time from different locales. It was typified by broadcast – radio, television and the early incarnation of the Internet, whose first use as a new medium was the emulation of the old media. But now, we can further refine our understanding of mass media culture as it is emerging today – that which allows massive participation in the creation of cultural artefacts at different physical times, from different physical locales, with the individual perception of simultaneity and immediate proximity."

Posted by: Mark Federman at October 24, 2004 2:08 PM | Permalink

Jay, I have the same feeling. I'm doing my graduate research on this thrilling nexus of the Internet, participatory democracy and journalism. And there's just no way my research can keep up with all that's happening. Although it's fun to try.

No surprise, I guess, that the research has given birth to a blog (The Participant). It just seems like the best way to keep track, even though one can't possibly get to everything.

Posted by: Joe Stange at October 24, 2004 2:22 PM | Permalink

Weldon, the Volokh Conspiracy shares my concern noting, "You'd need to do a study which includes errors that would seem appealing to each side, and then see whether Republicans fall for the errors that would tempt them, and the Democrats resist those that would tempt them. But I haven't seen any such study, and the [PIPA] study ... certainly doesn't try to do this sort of balanced analysis."

Posted by: sbw at October 24, 2004 2:28 PM | Permalink

Mary Ann; "But what we are really discussing here is who has the right to report events and generate social commentary. Well, on events we can trust our own eyes and ears and the internet allows us to contact people from all over the country and the world, thus having access to lots of raw data and filtering that based on our professional expertise (of whatever type), our cognitive stage, and our personhood. We're at the point where many of us are recognizing, gee... I have my own perspective and I want to share that.

Yes, thank you for your insights. Actually, I am a psychologist (industrial/organizational) not a journalist but it seems to me that psychology has a great deal to contribute to this discussion (In other words, "gee...I have my own perspective and I want to share that!")

One famous psych study c 1951 showed students and Alum of Princeton and Dartmouth a film of a controversial game between P & D. It was a vicious game, lots of penalties. The loyalty of the viewers resulted in what can only be described as perceptions of a different game by Princeton fans and Dartmouth fans although they all saw identical footage.

A football game assumes two sides, but in most world/national events we look to our common leader to explain what we see. In George Bush, however, we have a president who appears to be deliberately uninterested in what you and I might call "reality". His POV is all that matters. So the PIPA reports comment is useful: "One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them." George Bush is cultivating ignorance. He chooses to see what he wants to see, and he just makes stuff up when it makes persuasion easier or more convincing. Your comment upthread that "Psychopathology [is] trickling down from the top, seeping into the society." is echoed by Weldon Berger's comment: "The "reality-based community" and the PIPA survey are significant because they point up that a great many people in this country are, for all practical purposes, psychotic" Americans are being misled, intentionally, by those in power.

Weldon Berger also makes an excellent point that seems to me to be very relevant: "...as an institution, journalism is amnesiac; it doesn't hold on to memories much longer than the hero in Memento" This reminds me that one of the essential features of scientific thinking could be described as memory--going back and considering what previous research has found and building arguments based on past findings. Scientific thinking is what differentiates the Bush WH from people in the "reality-based community." When we analyze judiciously (as it were) we are reflecting, evaluating, considering previous actions/findings/events.

Journalism in the US has not had to have a memory, because journalists could 1) count on the implicit memory inherent in a shared culture; 2) assume that leaders valued evidence (facts) & expertise and would speak the truth and provide explanations that accounted for reality. Basically they could assume that everyone was on the same team or a fan of the same team, playing by the same rulebook and in the game.

But the media today operates in an environment in which 1) the culture is comprised of many POV and competing values (with avenues for expression such as the internet); 2) a President and his men who don't care tuppence for "objective truth" and will deliberately mislead the electorate and just make up stuff to consolidate their power. How does journalism change when we have two teams and one of them, say, the Princeton team, is no longer willing to play by the rules? One would hope that the President of Princeton would clarify and challenge the partisan instincts of the fans, but instead he is encouraging the rivalry. The fans of each team will see different games, although the footage is identical, and no one has stepped forward to call them back to a common understanding of the world.

So, back to Mary Ann's point "But what we are really discussing here is who has the right to report events and generate social commentary, I would add to that that we also discussing who has the responsibility to provide the memory (or narrative) that helps us understand events in appropriate context. Our leaders, who can be expected to do this, are failing or, worse, are deliberately choosing to mislead. In the void, comedians like Jon Stewart are providing context for interpreting facts, naming the meta-story. The pressure is on the media to pick up some of the slack.

Again, my apologies for such a long post. I promise I won't do this again. Interesting topic. I am confident the social psychologists will work on this for a long time to come.

Posted by: PTate in MN at October 24, 2004 2:30 PM | Permalink

Joe Stange: "the research has given birth to a blog (The Participant)."

I'm eager to see the blog, but the link doesn't work. Help?

Posted by: PTate in Mn at October 24, 2004 2:34 PM | Permalink

I don't think Den Beste is right at all about the Protestant Reformation. Luther was attacking the Catholic Church from the right. He was arguing that the Church had strayed from the literal teachings of the Bible, and promoted a more fundamentalist interpretation. His goal was to eliminate the middleman, to tear down the high clergy that he thought was injecting too much worldliness into Christianity. The printing press, then, didn't start out as a tool for the "secular elite." It ended up that way, but it began as a tool for fundamentalists.

Posted by: praktike at October 24, 2004 3:01 PM | Permalink

Much of what is presented here as new doesn't strike me as all that new. Jon Stewart is to American culture in 2004 what Will Rogers was a couple of generations ago and Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken were a generation or two before that.

The blogosphere, in large part, is simply taking over the role that second- and third-tier newspapers used to play in most cities and that alternative weeklies have played since then. Real-time fact checking is a potential blessing, but it pales compared to the fact checking that competitive media once exercised on each other.

Bloggers may in fact be a bigger immediate threat to traditional media alternatives than to the oligopolies that run major media these days, because the big companies have the clout to buy off competition and control the regulatory environment. Anything that hurts big media hurts the little guy first.

Moreover, in my (admittedly limited) experience, the blogging elite are a much more elite group than the working journalists I have known. The few prominent bloggers whose identitities I know seem disproportionately to be people who:
1. Are already part of the "media elite."
2. Hold advanced degrees and jobs in academia.
3. Work as consultants and lawyers.
4. Publish books and own companies.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, and I'm not saying there aren't plenty of exceptions, but to suppose that bigtime bloggers represent some sort of democratic alternative to the days when reporters were high school dropouts who wandered from job to job and kept a flask in the desk strikes me as a perverted understanding of what it means to be elite.

What's really changed is that the internet makes it possible to do what I have just done: fire off leatherheaded opinions in real time, without the reflection required to type a final draft and find a stamp.

Posted by: David Crisp at October 24, 2004 4:54 PM | Permalink

One connecting theme, IMHO: the colossal broadcast system and its antics, vs those that hack in or around the system to fulfill what it can not.

There is news, and there is the reporting of news, and there is the broadcast system that delivers the reporting of news. The broadcast system becomes so encompassing that it names what it broadcasts "news" and becomes convinced of what is a classic system delusion: "the chart is the patient".*

Large scale politics functions significantly in the realm of this delusion: what's real is not what has happened; what's real is what is broadcast about what is reported to have happened.

Jon Stewart hacks in the system: he broadcasts reporting that is absurd, and it shows how the brodcast + reporting system's autopilot mode works by keeping the system at a safe distance from the turbulence of facts.

Bloggers hack around the system: they are small enough to maneuver close to the facts, and only sometimes need the broadcast reportage for weather reports. The broadcast system tries to make a spectacle out of predicting the weather, but bloggers just grab the data, both from the broadcast system and more directly, and make their own predictions.

"Any large system is going to be operating most of the time in failure mode".*

"When big systems fail, the failure is often big. Colossal systems foster colossal errors".*

* quotes come from the book, The Systems Bible (aka "Systemantics"), which I recommend. I think it's good insights into general system problems apply well to the problems of the broadcasters.

Posted by: Jay Fienberg at October 24, 2004 4:57 PM | Permalink

At the top of this comment thread, Mary Ann's "Humility" quotation from T. S. Eliot is from the poem "Burnt Norton", available here in "Four Quartets". Thanks for the delightful quote made all the sweeter for me for my having consistently presented both humility and the concept of time and one's place in it as key to understand how to frame experience and respond to it, which I've included in my old early draft on Simple Wisdoms.

Posted by: sbw at October 24, 2004 5:04 PM | Permalink

I fixed the link, PTate. You can find The Particpant here as well.

Thanks for these comments. They're helping. Keep 'em coming.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at October 24, 2004 5:15 PM | Permalink

How to test whether the "reality-based" folks would continue to believe an error?

What comes to my mind is Clinton's lie. Now, I don't have any data here, but I never believed what he said about his sexual dalliance with Monica. Maybe somewhere out there in internetland, there is a poll from back then, indicating the percentage of Democrats (or Clinton supporters) who believed the president and so on.

We can't just make things up to see if people would believe an error. In the PIPA poll, people were asked about "current events" and their beliefs about what had occurred or not. There are likely other events which might be utilized. (Some may arrive next month!)

I'm also wondering if these two different ways of thinking are based on two ways of gathering information. For example, (a) is the "reality-based" view more dependent on going to the source documents (Taguba report, you name it) while (b) are those endorsing the "created reality" more apt to seek out "authorities" who assertively make claims (however far from the facts they may be). This may be too simplistic but it does bear consideration.

I also wonder, given that sbw in the post above has mentioned "time," whether the fact that all of us can have a "conversation" which extends over time and is not dependent on place may somehow play a role in all of this. We each go about our lives, pondering, responding, and this very discussion itself becomes an aspect of the issues Jay has raised.

Posted by: Mary Ann at October 24, 2004 8:53 PM | Permalink

I'm not an expert on rhetoric, but I thought I'd take an amatuer's shot at applying the noetic field (see Cline) to the thread.

There are two striking lines of thought in this thread:

1. The Bush administration has plunged us into an enterprise that can only be described as Wilsonian and progressive. "Reality-based" was the domain of conservatives criticizing the etheral marketing claims of progressives and liberals. The ideal, perfection, utopia, where crime, poverty, racism and joblessness could be defeated with one more bureaucracy, one more government program, was not the domain of the "reality-based community". Dreamers, yes. Reality-challenged, perhaps.

The Bush administration is engaged in an idealistic pursuit of democratization, globalization and capitalism. They are, like many administrations before them, marketing a war and a campaign personified by the President. FDR was not a member of the "reality-based community". He was an entrepreneur, envisioning both the New Deal and WWII. Both containing major failures and successes.

This is the contribution of the Bush administration to a different noetic field made possible by a massive distrust in what was "known" as reality on 9/11/2001. The rhetoric of "everything changed" leaves much of what we understood and trusted about reality behind. But there is a more dynamic flow of information today, and more information available.

2. Some projects are reality challenged, and strain our ability to grasp the bounds of a noetic field. Has anyone ever been involved in a project where management, or perhaps marketing, were "reality-challenged"?

We have developed tools to map progress and productivity toward well-defined goals. An engineer takes the imagined and fictional and breaks it down into smaller, necessarily solvable problems. Each step is built upon something that came before, but may represent a leap from what was previously possible.

I can remember my grandfather laughing at the reality-challenged community that talked about rockets and space and the moon. He was a reality-based, hard working man with both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Again, the Bush administration has plunged us into a project which is "reality-challenged". He did it in Afghanistan and in Iraq. But we, as a nation, are not working from the same milestones or risk assessments. We have different noetic fields with a smorgasbord of information available and a post-modern arrogance to see ourselves as Lippman's "omnicompetent" citizen.

Bush is to blame for some of the dissonance, but not all of it. There are some who are now proclaiming membership in the "reality-based community" that are really dreaming of a different nonexistent reality than the one being pursued by this administration.

Posted by: Tim at October 24, 2004 10:12 PM | Permalink

I'm not ready for more complex explanations where simpler ones help.

PressThink is a microcosm of the greater reality. If Jay turned off comments, his blog would recreate the traditional main stream media world complete with minimal, delayed feedback and Jay's choice whether or not to share that feedback with readers. Turn on comments and the habits of the readers, previously throttled back, become contributions, much like multi-channels in today's greater world.

In the microcosm, PressThink the medium isn't the problem. Nor is its technology or the multiplicity of world views. To find the problem, just review previous messages to find some contributors for whom playing for keeps is more important than collaborating to understand. Weblog microcosms are reluctant to recognize that kind of behavior, label it, and encourage its improvement -- or, when logic fails, to either isolate it or laugh it down.

Project that to the greater world, where the political stakes are so massive the universe around the campaign gets warped; where leaders of both parties got where they are by playing the game for keeps, not for collaboration. What goes is anything you get away with -- For both sides. The difference technologically is that with the internet, more people are looking and more people are talking. Just not effectively yet.

Just like in the microcosm, in the larger world the media isn't the problem. Nor is its technology or the multiplicity of world views. The problem is our reluctance to recognize short-sighted behavior, label it, and encourage its improvement. Or, when logic fails, to laugh it down -- the way Jon Stewart recently did.

Mary Ann asks "who has the right to report events and generate social commentary." The answer is everyone, of course, for our own safety's sake. Good journalists do not write for objectivity, but to stand up to scrutiny. We need to help people learn to scrutinize. Until then -- until it no longer works -- spinsanity.org will have much to write about.

Until then people like Ron Suskind will be able to get away with accusing Bush -- for arriving at positions that you and I could reasonably reach by rational means -- of belief in magic with no more evidence than that which led to the Salem Witch trials.

Posted by: sbw at October 24, 2004 10:53 PM | Permalink

Jay: Every one of these things is related to all the others. But there is no over-arching narrative to contain them all. I spend much of the day trying to figure out what the connections are, and how best to phrase them. It's exciting; it's exhausting.

I'm wondering if it would help to categorize the list in three parts? I don't think this is correct, but a first try? Much of this list seems based on pathos, inflaming and fueling passions, and mythos. There seems to be a longing for an emphasis on ethos and logos.

• Top Down
• There's Signal in That Noise: The White House, the Reality Principle and the Press
• Bush to Press: "You're Assuming That You Represent the Public. I Don't Accept That."
• The problem of propaganda and the intensity of its practice in 2004
• Political attacks seeking to discredit the press and why they're intensifying
• The "reality-based community" thesis and the Bush Administration
• And then there's this: the separate realities of Bush and Kerry supporters
• The political divide and the passions it has unleashed this year
• Why argument journalism is more involving than the informational kind
• Assaults on the very idea of a neutral observer, a disinterested account
• Caught Between
• Multiple essays on CBS, Sinclair, Karen Ryan, Transparency, ...
• Scandals in the news business and the damage they are sowing
• The collapse of traditional authority in journalism and what replaces it
• The era of greater transparency and what it's doing to modern journalism
• "He said, she said, we said" and why it's such an issue this year
• Amateurs vs. professionals; distributed knowledge vs. credentialed expertise
• Jon Stewart and why he seems to be more credible to so many
• Bottom Up
• Multiple essays on Bloggers, Public Journalism, ...
• Trust in the mainstream media and what's happening to it
• Bloggers, their role in politics, their effect on the press: their significance
• How the Net explosion is changing the relationship between people and news
• The entrance of new players of all kinds in presidential campaigning
• The producer revolution underway among former consumers of media
• Why the culture war keeps going, this year reaching the mainstream press
• Why periods of intense partisanship coincide with high involvement

Posted by: Tim at October 25, 2004 12:55 AM | Permalink

Mr. Rosen: What I really wanted to say to the BBC guy was: There's too much reality rushing over us every day just now. And it's pushing me to the limits of my own vocabulary.

The Gutenberg/Luther emblem for our (still) emerging cluster of Web technologies is something I've considered a fair bit, also. Particularly through the lense of Lucien Febvre's The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 within which it is argued that the adoption of a new technological epoch is still affected for a time by the epoch preceeding. For instance, in the early years of the printed book, most people still read standing, as was the practice when reading scrolls. In other words, we are now still a 'book/newspaper culture' trying to become what will follow it.

In that vein, I ask you to consider the works and contributions of another individual, perhaps not as well known -- Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan: the father of modern library science and a pioneer in subject classification and indexing.

Considering the democratization of information and our shared condition of 'rushing reality,' perhaps the product or service of the journalist of the future is akin to librarianship on-the-fly. By that I mean the tasks of collection development/authority control (what's good, what's not and is it reliable), indexing (what belongs with what), and cataloging (how do I get to it the next time), with a diminished responsibility for Op/Ed or 'scooping', and yet an increased reliance upon journalistic credibility.

Anyhow, this is the wall I'm climbing, and it seemed to touch on several of your points, as well.

Posted by: Billducks at October 25, 2004 2:17 AM | Permalink

soldiers need to know history and then what the motives of their paymasters are so should those who have chosen the pen rather than the gun ...

Posted by: Shahadat at October 25, 2004 5:39 AM | Permalink

We are experiencing a perfect storm based upon four colliding fronts: technological, cultural, biological and political.

Technological advancement is demanding a shift in our culture as to how we access, manage, evaluate and distribute information. That has been occurring everywhere, particularly in the business world for the last several years - it is nothing new, nor unique to this election season.

The current politics, being what they are - significant and polarizing, are magnifying the issue for parties who have not yet had to confront this evolution in our world. And, important point, it is not a "revolution" as many characterize it, but merely an advancement within a society that has been experiencing such advancement since we first started scratching out images on cave walls.

In short, all of our "rolls" are shaking out and the anxiety realized any time that happens on a broad scale within a culture makes it all seem, at times, a bit overwhelming. It needn't be.

The technology will stay and continue to advance; individuals and institutions will struggle and eventually redefine themselves sufficiently within the contemporary landscape; the current magnification being experienced as result of a hotly contested and immediate political reality will subside; and our biology will adjust, just as it has to reading, building, driving, flying, etc. Note, when first confronting the written word society experienced great panic with persecution as the result of threats to established institutions from individuals changing within the broader culture.

In short, relax, nothing is really changing all that much - we just "think" it is. Get over it. The vast majority of our population do not even realize, or think about this - and they don't need to. It is process - and when you attempt to take process apart to the Nth degree from within, you cultivate a sense that you are losing your footing because you are taking apart the very thing within which you currently exist. It can't be done, at least not well, and that's why we have a wonderful thing called "history" to do it for us.

Our Grandchildren may well love reading about it, but, alas, for us, we are all but small players in the currently evolving grand scheme and we'd likely fair better if we learn to simply enjoy the ride, as opposed to trying to extract every penny's worth of value from the wonderful free ticket we've been given for having been born here and now. Take the dog to the park and spend some quality time with the kids - you'll be the better for it. And the "revolution" will be here when you get back, if you're still so inclined as to want to write about it.

Posted by: Dan at October 25, 2004 5:49 AM | Permalink

Jay, it is NOT a "culture war" -- it is a Moral Superiority War.

When is it moral to fight evil? When fighting evil means killing; AND dying; AND even killing some innocents?

Do Human Rights really supersede "national sovereignty" in a moral order? If yes ... who enforces the human rights?

The UN failed in Rwanda. And in Cambodia -- where Peace and genocide was supported by Kerry instead of (endless?) fighting evil.

Enforcing morality has moral costs. The Left refuses to accept any responsibility for immoral results from their policies, but are double-standard quick to criticize imperfections and big errors of the Reps.

The big big lack of coverage is examination of tradeoffs. More security costs freedom -- freedom comes with less security. Better stuff costs more, and there is a limited current budget.

There is also an appalling lack of "standards" for success. Neither group is providing a reasonable way, in advance, of judging their own performance.

Bush has 5.4 unemployment; some 3% inflation. Those are GREAT numbers -- but somehow "not good enough". In who's dreams?

The Press, being PC Bush-haters, have put themselves and their "objectivity" in play -- by being so obviously biased. The new technology is showing the bias -- but as the 60s anti-war boomers have become "establishment", their elitist dismissal of alternative views, and especially their anti-Christian views, causes increasing objections to such "nattering nabobs of negativity".

But morality evaluations are the base -- what is good, and evil, and why? (Without God, it's all relative, just a matter of opinion. Majoritarian or otherwise.)

Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at October 25, 2004 6:05 AM | Permalink

Too Much Reality?

I've noted the discordance, too. Here's my shot at it.

Their liberalism has been nurtured for years in resentment of U.S. military power and the "imposition" of American pop culture on more "pure" cultures.

Then came 9/11. Their brains told them to be grateful for our military strenth and that our culture is superior to one which would carry out and celebrate such attacks. But, over time, their hearts wouldn't cooperate. They reflexively pounced on every mis-cue by the military and have never found the words to totally denounce tyrants like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. They have proved incapable of celebrating the miracle of the Afghan elections. They say they honor the troops, but their "blame America first" instincts keep bubbling to the surface.

Thus, the dissonance is in their own heads. They recognize the newly dangerous world. They just resent that America is the hero in this tale.

Posted by: JeanneB at October 25, 2004 6:24 AM | Permalink

Seems to me the divide is between those who still hold to the existence of absolute or objective truth, exogenous to themselves, and those who regard truth as a personal, existential construct with the consequent that "truth" can be molded to meet pragmatic ends. This dichotomy corresponds (but only roughly) to the current liberal-conservative paradigm. In terms of the press, I think that some who are part of the first group are being exposed as, in the language of the second group, liars.

I too have seen the analogy to Gutenberg. Again the great unwashed have been given reason to distrust the keepers of knowledge and are looking for other sources of guidance. When the monolith can't be trusted the only viable alternative is a wild and woolly fallback to decentralized, sometimes feuding and often uncredentialed individuals.

Posted by: Kevin at October 25, 2004 6:47 AM | Permalink

What do you think, Jay and others, about this: reality or illusion?

http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/2004/10/good-news-from-iraq-part-13.html

P.S. Thanks for the link to the T.S. Elliot poems.

Posted by: Catherine Ellen at October 25, 2004 6:49 AM | Permalink

random note: I notice Instapundit linked to you.

Lately, similar questions have been on my mind on the effects of the Internet and blogging on journalism.
I ended up reading "Which Technology and Which Democracy?" by Benjamin Barber recently and brings up a lot of potential pitfalls in the Internet and democracy. While I see the potential in blogging to rejuvenate democracy, there's also the huge potential for blogging to damage democracy in several ways.

1) Overload of information. We get information so fast that we can't process it or put it in a framework that a large number of people can handle. Added danger is incorrect information.

2) Larger media/"power" influencing the direction of the Internets by either purchasing or co-opting bloggers into the mainstream. This may put undue pressure on bloggers to not say what they think.

3) The potential to segment society further by control of information. While I would argue that this segmentation has been in play for decades now. The Internet and blogs may end up being a double-edge sword as their use can end up going either in the direction of further segmentation, or in the direction of rebuilding diverse communities.

The obvious bonus of blogging is that it puts the mainstream media's "feet to the fire" to eliminate the memory hole in journalism and force them to become more responsible in creating an authoritative narrative about the world (which may not be possible for various reasons).

Like you said, all those questions you asked are impossible to answer in a short post, but probably the most important thing I have to say to people is here: Please use blogs to expand your viewpoint. You don't have to spend scads of time looking, but make sure you get a diverse set of beliefs and don't give up on reading people if they displease you. It's important for democracy to function properly to keep a steady diet of opposing arguments.

Posted by: Steve at October 25, 2004 6:56 AM | Permalink

(This is what I get for trying to be coherent at 4am.) To clarify, my point is that there are some in the press now being exposed via the Internet as viewing "truth" as a tool for pragmatic ends. Many among the masses, not being quite so "nuanced", aren't buying it. Indeed, many are offended.

Posted by: Kevin at October 25, 2004 6:58 AM | Permalink

Different views of reality?
One: The press is elite in training and often in background, so they never hear a different voice. The people therefore do not see their point of view in the press and seek it in less credible places.
Maybe we should go back to the days when copyboys from working class families became reporters. The press cannot see the forest for the trees. The last decent "report" on this was "red state blue state" in the Atlantic...but usually, blue staters are framed as "the other" rather than "one of us"...Class bigotry is rampant and ignored.

Two:is it a coincidence that bloggers tend to be from Tennesee, Minneapolis or other places usually ignored by the press? Blue state Oklahoma is assumed to be pro Bush...but not once have I seen it discussed why we have a Democratic governor. Hint: Economic matters. But Blue dog Democrats, Koch Democrats and pro life Democrats are unwelcome in the party...again the press in their elite cocoon seems oblivious to this...

Three: Kerry is quoting the bible to support socialized medicine, but not one reporter questioned why these issues were not solved by eight years of a popular Democrat, nor if a monolithic socialized medicine is the answer (I work for a federal system. Hint: Look at the VA)...

Four, Viet Nam...the Swift boat veterans bring up Kerry's open opposition of the war and his branding of Vietnam soldiers as baby killers as an issue, but since few reporters are either Nam vets or Vietnamese refugees, they have left Kerry get away with playing both sides of the issue. The press never brings up the ten million Cambodians killed because of American disengagement in the war...would the same thing happen in Iraq if we disengaged? Again, a class difference.

Five: few veterans in the press. The Mainline press sits in Baghdad...spinning a new VietNam... But in this war, many soldiers are blogging, so when the press prints the 120th AbuGrab story, we can read a different point of view...and guess who we believe?

Six: when things are actually "discussed", nuance is not done, only polarization. So the demagogues spin...but few really discuss things...so I get my news on the net, and when these "discussions" start, I thank God for the remote, and thank God for Animal Planet.

Seven: Religion. The press is clueless as Archbishop Chaput found when his nuanced interview was spun to make him appear to the right of Pat Robertson...thanks to the internet, the full interview was published and publicized, but not discussed. Why? Because the press doesn't know what to do with an articulate bishop who doesn't fit their preconceived notions that all religious people are nincompoops (traditional believers are usually represented by obvious southern obese demagogues, not articulate Potawanami Catholic bishops. Why?)

Posted by: tioedong at October 25, 2004 7:36 AM | Permalink

We now have an oversupply of people to grow food and build things. We are now deciding what the oversupply is going to do.

Posted by: huggy at October 25, 2004 7:39 AM | Permalink

Re: Comedians.
Jon Stewart?
Why not SouthPark?
Again, by assuming the elite yuppies have the last laugh, the press is ignoring South Park Republicans...

Posted by: tioedong at October 25, 2004 8:13 AM | Permalink

Huggy: We now have an oversupply of people to grow food and build things. We are now deciding what the oversupply is going to do.

Huggy's is a sentence of delightful, useful clarity. It reminds us why people communicate -- because understanding can come from anywhere. (And the corollary -- that a bad idea can come from anywhere under the guise of being a good idea.)

Because of instant turnaround (earlier I called it the shortening of the feedback relaxation cycle... sorry for the jargon.) our task is to manufacture enough patience to dampen the cycle... to give us enough time to examine whether what someone says is the most useful way to look at something.

For example, Huggy reminds us that outsourcing accounts for less than three percent, compared to increased productivity which is by far the largest cause of job loss. Dwell on the former and you might win an election; on the latter and you might solve a large social problem.

Posted by: sbw at October 25, 2004 8:34 AM | Permalink

Billducks: perhaps the product or service of the journalist of the future is akin to librarianship on-the-fly.

A paper I wrote in 1990,"Newspapers in 2010", predicted:

"Internally at the newspaper [in 2010], our staff has changed complexion, adding the position of Archivist. Archivists maintain the most efficient paths to index and reference our collected data. They also help reporters investigate public databases. Business and governmental bureaucracies occasionally try to remove indexes that reference potentially embarrassing information or they try to obfuscate the issues with so much information that news becomes lost in the noise. Archivists try to deduce what might be there but, because of the lack of index connections, cannot be reached. We learned long ago that whoever controls the index controls the future."

Posted by: sbw at October 25, 2004 8:38 AM | Permalink

Having read the introduction of the Pipa report, and coming to the following phrase, With the reports of David Kay, the 9/11 Commission, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and most recently Charles Duelfer all refuting these beliefs, I found no need to go further.

The real battle for journalistic value and integrity is in consciensiously providing informative truth about a subject.

Having read both the 9-11 commission report and the Duelfer report, I can tell you that the conclusion reached so early by the Pipa Authors before leaving the introduction encourages me to discount their entire piece of "research".

Access to the internet gives ordinary individuals access to information such as the following:

Iraqi Nuclear program
Uranium Stockpile
Scientist hands over documents and parts.
Even CNN saw it
Mobile biological labs
...and another at a missle factory
Iraqi missle engines in Jordan? Yup!
Fighter Jets found buried in desert
Both mustard gas and sarin gas found...
Other banned weapons programs...
David Kay's input
Other banned weapons programs...
Other banned weapons programs...
...and another...

Until investigative journalists learn to investigate and reporters learn to report, the average citizen will continue to go around their filters and will do the due diligence to find the facts they are looking for.

Ther is no dual-reality. There is truth and there are lies. I want the news organizations to feed me as much truth as they think I can handle. Otherwise, they become nothing more than tabloid entertainers.

But, hey, there's a terrific market for that, right?

Posted by: Rich at October 25, 2004 8:44 AM | Permalink

"Before Gutenberg, 'truth' and 'history' were largely properties of the Christian Church (and there was only one Christian Church, then)."

Incorrect, the church had been split in two along Catholic/Orthodox lines by the Great Schism in the 11th century. This is just a nit pick though, the broader implications of Steven's point are uneffected.

Posted by: Jeff the Baptist at October 25, 2004 8:59 AM | Permalink

It took awhile to realize that a lot of people on this thread were lefties. Comments by PTate were especially wild. I am a metrosexual yuppie liberal from Manhattan who A) abandoned Manhattan on 9/12/01 because my sense of "reality" was that there was too much of a risk that New York City would be nuked in the next terror attack...and B) has admired and respected George Bush's vision on the war on terror since 9/12/01.

So just as my IQ, like George Bush's, is in the mid 120s compared to John Kerry's 120, I consider Bush supporters who are smart enough not to congregate in easily nuked cities, to be of a superior intellect to urban dwellers, most of whom are less educated than rural folk. Remember that the Democrat Party and liberals in general are, by definition, representatives of the poor and uneducated.

Now about Jon Stewart: this clown is one of the better examples of someone who has been totally taken for a ride by the left wing media...found some extra-curricular reading in a guy like Michael Moore and then criticized the media for not leaning far enough left. Give me a break. Jon Stewart's knowledge of history is non-existent. The same thing cannot be said about people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who could devastate any liberal in a debate about history.

Posted by: Jennifer Peterson at October 25, 2004 9:02 AM | Permalink

One of the reasons J. Stewart and other comedians appear more credible than others is because they not only are willing to notice the elephant in the living room, but they make fun of it.

I am a Bush supporter, but let's face it- the man is a crappy public speaker. Ever hear anyone in the Mainstream press mention that? No, but Stewart and the SNL crew will, and do it in a funny way.

Things like that make them more credible while making CNN, MSNBC, and the NY Times seeem like like they are merely too polite to do anything but play establishment games.

Posted by: John Cole at October 25, 2004 9:19 AM | Permalink

I think Steven Den Beste pretty much nails it although, given that I was once on the end of a magisterial put down from him on his blog I would want to quibble a little on detail. One Christian Church around the time of the invention of movable type? Tsk Tsk. The Great Schism was in 1054. So at least two Christian Churches even leaving aside the Armenians, Copts and so on.

Posted by: Tim Worstall at October 25, 2004 9:29 AM | Permalink

I say it's about control: If you give us, the people, control of our media -- and government and markets -- we will use it (see Jarvis' First Law of Media). If we do not think we have control, then we'll turn into passive spuds. But once we do have control -- whether from the remote control or the TiVo or our blogging tools -- everything changes: We demand to be part of the conversation. We compete with the once-powerful. We question their power. We establish new relationships of trust.

Posted by: Jeff Jarvis at October 25, 2004 9:42 AM | Permalink

One "unifying theme" is most definitely a demographic/generational one: After the standard 36-year cycle, the boomer Class of '68 has reached its socio-cultural endgame.
From 1788 and before, with the exception of 1824, every 36-year period in this country has corresponded to major upheavals: 1860, 1896, 1932, 1968, and now 2004. The Dems' levels of villification and vituperation are attitudinal, based not on rational premises but on individual narcissism plus a herd mentality directly attributable not only to the size of the 1946 cohort but to the fact that from earliest youth in 1950 an era of free-market abundance in the developed world has spoiled 'em rotten.
The reason that so-called "liberals" are so nasty, hoity-toity shrikes (especially the feministical contingent), is that they cannot afford specifics. They want it all, they want it now, and when infantile histrionics fail they must and will find "the Establishment","society", or whatever else to blame.
Argument with such is useless, because any objective conclusion requires that reality intrude. To them, it's words, just words-- very Humpty Dumpty, as Alice found. These types never have faced anything seriously (why should they?), and are not about to start.
If the Boomers lose this one, do not expect a Democrat rebound until about 2040; and even then, absent '68, there will be not just different Democrats but different kinds of Democrats. In nine days, we'll have one lever, only one, to pull-- not a "charisma" lever, an economic lever, a national defense lever, etc. Pulling for Kerry is entirely retrograde; for Bush, at least you've entered the 21st Century. As Jack Aubrey might say, "Bet on the lesser of two weevils." Amen.

Posted by: John Blake at October 25, 2004 9:52 AM | Permalink

Everyone is talking. No one is listening.

Posted by: RiCo at October 25, 2004 9:58 AM | Permalink

Jeff: If you give us, the people, control of our media -- and government and markets -- we will use it.

What good is control if you are childish in your understanding? Control alone is not enough. You must also earn humility from experience.

Posted by: sbw at October 25, 2004 10:23 AM | Permalink

The issue is information availability, fact-checking, and subsequent loss of credibility. The PIPA poll is typical, taking liberty with the facts to make a larger case. For example, its first assertion:

[Duelfer's report concluded] "that before the war Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction nor even a significant program for developing them."

Sorry guys, but that's not what it said. If you want to be picky, it confirmed WMDs: "a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered . . ." But in any event, Duelfer's report lists several programs that were ongoing through the sanctions period, some of which were ongoing at the beginning of OIF. The main finding and opening statement was Saddam's intent:

"He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted."

Certainly there's no need to read an erroneous summary of Duelfer's report, when I can download and read it myself. And once people do that, and compare it to the media version, any bias is immediately evident. It's certainly made me more critical.

Posted by: Cecil Turner at October 25, 2004 10:35 AM | Permalink

Why do you (and PIPA) mischaracterize their data as demonstrating "separate realities" of Bush & Kerry supporters? Every result illustrates one group living in reality, the other in demonstrable illusion. Why is this sort of dishonesty (I mean the false relativism) so pervasive?

Posted by: hmc at October 25, 2004 10:41 AM | Permalink

Jay,

There is a conventional narrative, seen here in comments, of the voice of authority, control and generational change. I do think that commentary found on the Internet tends to over-emphasize technology. It's our bias, and we should be wary.

If you accept that the 60s challenged institutional authority, the mass media (and visually thru TV) became the platform for that challenge. It branded mass media information in the form of news and commentary. This struggle over authority and control happened before in the late 20s/early 30s.

There is another struggle today. Politicians, capitalists and our mass media "4th Estate" are jockeying for their place in the pecking order. They are using well worn tools (i.e., propaganda) and experimenting with new platforms.

What the Internet has done is raise the noise floor by amplifying the citizen chattering class. There is power in the noise and we have seen an occasional filtering to produce a coherent application - mostly as a challenge to another, previously thought more authoritative, signal source.

The "truth" is that there are no perfect sources. No completely trustworthy institutions. And no perfect receivers of information. But we do need to organize: ourselves, our map view of reality, and the information available to us.

We do that by exerting more or less control over information, weighting it based on authority/trustworthiness, and overlaying it on our pre-existing map.

Then we cheer our team to the championship while blaming the coach and the quarterback for every setback.

Posted by: Tim at October 25, 2004 10:49 AM | Permalink

Weldon Berger asks SBW: to "offer some examples of questions, or phrasings of questions, that might result in as perverse an effect on Kerry supporters as you think the PIPA survey did on Bush supporters."

Well here's an easy one. Who is smarter? Bush or Kerry?

You could also phrase it this way. Is Bush intelligent?

I'm sure the question would provoke guffaws from Kerry supporters. Why even ask, they would say, and roar.

But now it turns out that there is a high probability that Bush has a higher IQ than Kerry. Even the NYTimes was impressed enough by the research, compiled by Steve Sailer to report on it.

This is not a surprise, btw, to Bush's "non-reality based" supporters. Bush obviously has less verbal intelligence than Kerry, but verbal intelligence is not the only kind of measureable intelligence. And when it comes to leadership, it is certainly not the only important kind of intelligence that matters.

I think one thing that Blue State people, living in a blue state dominated media world, don't take into account is the extent to which very simple rhetorical tricks of narrative framing of news stories often magnify the "received" perception of political reality. At Rantingprofs, Professor Cory Dauber does an excellent job of calling these kinds of tricks and devices into question, the narrative framing which the average reader or the reader who agrees with the unspoken biases of the author, might not notice. She points out how the biases of the reporters slips into the verbiage, sometimes, perhaps, unconsciously or because they are not very good at what they are doing, and often quite manipulatively.

But, of course, anyone who has done critical thinking on texts in Grad School knows how important it is to discern the assumptions of the author, the things that are implicit in the intellectual starting point and to cull that out from the final results. It's a mundane enough point; except on the whole, the media is not subjected publicly to that kind of critical scrutiny.

The point I am making, however, is slightly different. Blue state people with their blue state media have their biases and tendencies massaged by the media the majority of the time. Biases are often shared with the reporters on various stories. So there is no stickiness. There is no sense, at least on these stories, that the assumptions of the reporter are other than their own; and that those assumptions are coloring a great deal of the
reportage. They read the NYTimes, say, and it satisfies the way they look at the world, even when it is dealing with troubling news, and all is well. It reaffirms their perspective of the world.

But for numbers of Red State people who consciously don't share these assumptions, the sense of disjunction is heightened by that same sort of reporting and the critical faculties get turned on.

So for those of you who believe, like TPlate, that it is "the educated types" living in the North East who best understand the idea of other and complexity, I'd say that's evidence of a lack of complexity in your own thinking. The media spends a great deal of time presenting the conservative view as "other," so we are "other" all the time. We've learned how to deal with that already. It makes us understand implicitly the idea of other sides of the issue. For those of us interested in questions like this, in fact, it also sharpens and makes absolutely intuitive the critical faculty when it comes to the reading of the news.

Posted by: alcibiades at October 25, 2004 10:53 AM | Permalink

What you are describing can best be termed as a crisis of legitimization striking the MSM. Up until the rise of the internet and the blogosphere, the barriers to entry into the media business were fairly high - millions, or tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars were required to launch a newspaper, television station, or news network. Over time, like-minded individuals came to dominate the editorial decision-making processes of the MSM, to the point that they were fairly interchangeable commodities from a consumer's perspective. Indeed, the very process by which journalists become "credentialed" served not only as another barrier to entry, but as a barrier to almost any form of participation for the non-like-minded. One need only recall the struggle that worldnetdaily.com experienced in their attempts to get a press pass on Capital Hill not so long ago to see what I mean.

By eliminating the cost barrier and routing around the ideological barriers (for that is precisely what the like-minded mentality has become), the Internet has made it possible for anyone to participate, in accordance with their ability to write and persuade others, regardless of their "credentials" or their wealth.

However, eliminating the barriers was not enough to initiate the crisis of legitimization. For that, it required the establishment (i.e. the MSM) to slowly whittle away its legitimacy over a sustained period of time. It began long ago, perhaps even as far back as Cronkhite's declaration that Vietnam was unwinnable after Tet, and was certainly in full flourish by the time the Westmoreland, Food Lion, and Tailwind debacles occured at the end of the last century. Slowly but surely, the public came to view the MSM no longer as guardians of the republic, but as a tool that one group of (liberal) elites wielded against another, all in the name of "the people". Talk radio, especially Rush, was the wedge that began to split it all open. By calling the MSM to account, he raised further doubt (amongst moderates and conservatives) as to the integrity and reliability of all of the press. Yet one voice (or even dozens) on the radio was still insufficient to change things dramatically, precisely due to the barriers of entry discussed above. Even a vast radio footprint as Rush's is inadequate to the challenge of overthrowing an established media order with multiple, overlapping and self-reinforcing footprints covering the globe.

Thus, until the advent of political blogging, we had the necessary preconditions for a legitimization crisis - ongoing and substantial editorial failures; a belief that the all sides in the debate are merely agents of one of two factions of a governing elite; and a growing distrust of the MSM, which is now seen as an active participant in the political process, rather than the self-proclaimed unbiased neutral observer that the media ideologues so long proclaimed themselves to be. All that was needed was a trigger and an alternative with a global footprint, accessible to all.

It took the war with Iraq, and Baghdad Bob to bring things to a head. Andrew Gilligan's claims on the BBC that the Americans were nowhere near Saddam international airport, when in fact they had taken it over, eerily mirrored Baghdad Bob's claim that there were no Americans in Baghdad, despite the fact that M1 tanks were literally down the road from him as he spoke. The fact that the MSM happily reported his words as fact (out of fear of their minders) quickly revealed these journalists as jokes and embarassments to their profession. CNN's admission that it remained silent while its own employees were tortured by the Iraqi government was perhaps the height of shame in a media profession notable only for its lack of shame, and indeed lack of character.

Those who sought out real information about the war (a task that ought to have been fulfilled by a healthy, functional MSM) had to turn to the milblogs. But due to the heavy politicization of the war, things quickly descended into a "he said - she said" environment. Facts became irrelevant - witness the story of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum. At first, we were told that everything was stolen; later it turned out that very little at all was stolen, and was in fact hidden by the staff. Yet the MSM and the leftist blogs to this day still spread the lie that the museum was completely looted, despite the fact that it was not. When one points this out, one's facts are challenged by reference to already discredited reporting. This was a clear sign of an MSM in the full throes of a legitimization crisis. Facts alone no longer mattered, unless they supported one's arguement. The illusion of objectivity was shattered in the eyes of the politically active public on both sides (albeit not in the minds of MSM professionals). After all, if the MSM itself is incapable of uncovering and reporting facts (however distasteful to their own political beliefs), then just what value do they add to the process?

Election 04 unleashed the power of the blogs. Rathergate showed that the blogosphere has a far swifter decision loop than the MSM; it has repeatedly dislocated the traditional elites everytime they attempt to go beyond their self proclaimed "unbiased" remit. Witness what happened to the Guardian's Ohio campaign, and now to its semi-serious advocacy of assassination. Not only has the MSM been discredited, but it is now facing an enemy (and yes, the blogosphere IS an enemy of the MSM) that is able to "observe, orient, decide and act" far faster than itself. It is also able to self-correct swiftly and publically, something apparently impossible for the MSM, whose mantra now seems to be "deny, admit nothing, counter-accuse". This enemy is growing in size, influence and power and is helped along everytime the MSM attempts to fabricate or distort facts that can easily be checked by those with a subscription to Google.

Now that the crisis is in full swing, it is not surprising to see alternative venues such as Jon Stewart or the blogs taking more prominent positions in the political debate. After all, who is to say that the reporting in those venues is any less legitimate than that of the MSM? And with the recognition that there is no such thing as objective journalism anymore, it is no surprise that there is a "reality-gap" between the left and the right. In an era where each individual can easily immerse himself deeply in political discourse while never hearing a fair or honest discussion of competing views, it would be surprising if it were otherwise.

Thus, the importance of propaganda becomes greater as facts dissolve into disputed opinions. The rise of organizations such as moveon.org, (indeed any of the 527s) or Soros' intervention in American politics is a natural reaction to the collapse of MSM legitimacy. And the best propaganda is that which clearly focuses the hate of an individual upon the propagandist's political enemies. Hence we see the growing political invective, the use of social issues as political levers, the collapse of civility among the political leadership, and the nascent return of political violence (so far limited to voter harassment and campaign sign theft) to the American scene.

One can only wonder where things will go from here!

Hopefully this you will find this helpful in your discussion with the BBC.

Posted by: Karl Rotstan at October 25, 2004 10:57 AM | Permalink

Keep it coming. Thanks to all.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at October 25, 2004 10:59 AM | Permalink

The questions about the collapse of traditional authority and about amateurs vs. professionals jumped out at me.

America has a long history of individuals and small communities who headed off into unknown territory - think pilgrims and pioneers. Inevitably, those who succeeded gained skills and confidence and no longer felt dependent on the existing powers, much to the dismay of those in power.

Today, the frontiers are in the world of information and ideas, and those who have had power over information for many years are not happy. Bloggers and their readers have found that they are not dependent upon mainstream media. As a homeschooler, I can assure you that public school bureaucrats and the NEA are not happy that they can no longer control education. I'm sure there are other examples of groups in power that feel threatened by the independence of those they see as their rightful subjects.

It should hardly be surprising that a people who believe they can govern themselves will also believe that they can read and write articles about the government they have established, but independence is always a shock to those in power.

Posted by: JeanE at October 25, 2004 11:08 AM | Permalink

Jay,

I read about half of your comments, and I am struck by the focus on Jon Stewart. From my perspective, I do not understand this. While I have watched the comedians on Comedy Central, I have never been able to watch more than a few minutes of Jon Stewart. He is as condescending and pompous as many others, and his attempt to mask that condescension is obvious and inneffective.

Perhaps press types can identify with his attitudes and viewpoints. And maybe that is why press types are so taken aback by his assault. By the way, I watched his assault of Carlson and Begala on the Web, not on CNN. It also seemed condescending and rude, although I have little sympathy for the condescending and rude hosts of Crossfire. But I didn't get any visceral satisfaction out of the take-down. It was just more rudeness at Crossfire, i.e. more of the same.

Since I had long ago tuned out Crossfire, and similar types of shows on which the participants yell at one another, this seemed unremarkable to me. Perhaps because the Hosts were the targets of Stewarts disgust, the press types find this remarkable. But having long ago acted on my own disgust by changing the channel, or simply turning the tube off, I don't give the episode the same significance that many commenters here seem to.

But then again, I am just a viewer and a voter, not a press person. Maybe for press types, this really is a watershed moment. If so, that seems kind of sad to me. What took you guys so long to see how bad the show had become? Or have you yet seen it?

Posted by: Scott Harris at October 25, 2004 11:30 AM | Permalink

sbw comment:
"Just like in the microcosm, in the larger world the media isn't the problem. Nor is its technology or the multiplicity of world views. The problem is our reluctance to recognize short-sighted behavior, label it, and encourage its improvement."

Bingo.

Although I would characterize it a bit differently and say that communities that have no standards for personal conduct generally get lots of lousy conduct. If there is no penalty for behaving irresponsibly and irresponsible behavior is just a personal choice, then there is no community-based incentive to encourage good behavior.

Without any broader community standards, any behavior is okay because one can find a sub-community that agrees with and/or supports that behavior. In this environment, individuals can exist in microcosms without facing any challenge to their behavior or to the belief systems in which that behavior is rooted.

If one of the “multiplicity of world views” is a world view where there is no cost to short-sighted behavior, then that view becomes the lowest common denominator by which all world views will be evaluated. For exhibit A, see the UN.

(and for those of you who think that only Kerry voters live in the blue states, I am a Bush supporter living in Marin county and I am exposed to daily challenges to my belief systems)

Posted by: Fogcity at October 25, 2004 11:40 AM | Permalink

Tim,
I, too, am an amateur at "noetic" stuff too: Re your comment, "The Bush administration has plunged us into an enterprise that can only be described as Wilsonian and progressive," I would disagree with "can only be". One might also describe this enterprise as a "neo-colonial capitalist adventure." Which construct one prefers reflects underlying assumptions about "reality".

In terms of Cline's cite of James Berlin's definition of noetic field as "closed system defining what can, and cannot, be known; the nature of the knower; the nature of the relationship between the knower, the known, and the audience; and the nature of language" the choice of the construct "Wilsonian & progressive" rather than the choice of the construct "neo-colonial capitalistic adventure" reflects the turbulence in the noetic field. What is known? Who gets to decide?

I wasn't quite sure what you meant by "reality challenged". On the one hand "reality challenged" could mean that a leader has a vision of the future and is boldly, resolutely, leading to that future and some of us, the "reality challenged" lack the imagination to see the vision because the gap between our present "reality" and the vision is so great or because we will be losers in that "new reality". On the other hand, "reality challenged" could refer to the gap between the evidence, what is actually happening, and the rhetoric, spin and illusion.

Whether the Bush administration approach to the WOT is Wilsonian or neo-colonial will be empirical. Forty years from now, will the world be better, worse or just other? And better for whom, worse for whom?

Your subsequent three part list organizing Prof Rosen's issues I found persuasive. If I may put it slightly differently, Something is not right with the leadership, the grassroots are complaining, the media is caught in between and isn't quite sure how to respond.

As I reflected on this topic overnight, I found myself wondering if what is going on right now is simply that--in a era when we are facing horrific global threats--we have a incompetent (or possibly, more frighteningly, a psychopathic) leader--a man who does not hesitate to lie/cheat or manipulate others to promote his advantage, who is reckless, fearless, considers himself above the law, appears to enjoy inflicting pain on others, has contempt for others (thinks they are stupid or weak), feels no remorse, makes no mistakes. Such individuals are often quite charismatic and they can get ahead in the world. In fact, the business world has many examples of this phenomena and the damage they can do.

But how would the body politic respond to such a leader? The majority of people and institutions in a nation like ours assumes competence. Journalists and citizens can do their thing, we can bicker about the details (size of government, more taxes/less taxes, welfare reform/health reform) but life goes on. Changes happen, but the system works. But what happens if you get someone in control, by a fluke, who is not what he claims? What if the man in charge is a con artist backed by powerful interests? How long does it take for the electorate and our institutions to wake up to the con? People are very gullible. They can be manipulated by visuals, by fear, by vivid stories. Some folks, even very bright folk, are very slow to learn. Some will never learn. Institutions are slow: The media, as an institution, will be necessarily slow to recognize the situation and necessarily confused about how to respond.

In other comments on this thread, you can see this confusion played out. A number of Bush supporters have posted here. They talk about elitism. Liberals are "lefties" or "nasty, hoity-toity shrikes" They put forth "facts" to support that the media has a left wing bias (for example, that unemployment is at 5.4% although most economists explain that figure understates unemployment by 3-5% due to discouraged workers or complain because the press doesn't report good news from Iraq). They are ill-informed, make personal attacks and more hostile than curious. They will dismiss anything that disagrees with their POV as bias. They will rationalize Bush's record of failure as failures by the elite to move into the 21st century or as unfair or biased reporting. Religion and class resentment are playing an important role. IQ has been mentioned a number of times--the presence or lack thereof (always a numinous topic). I encourage open-minded people to read about the psychological construct of "authoritarianism"--a personality composite that underlies fascism. (hint: The single item that best predicts a authoritarian personality is "We need a strong leader to stomp out the rot that is threatening our nation.")

As sbw comments, "in the larger world the media isn't the problem. Nor is its technology or the multiplicity of world views. The problem is our reluctance to recognize short-sighted behavior, label it, and encourage its improvement."

But I would also say, going back to the "something is not right with the leadership" theme, that the liberal leadership has also failed. Right wing resentment was present before GWB. He has just ridden the crest. A large proportion of the American electorate are resentful, offended, feeling exploited and neglected, misrepresented, angry, willfully ill-informed, and frustrated. This suggests that the liberals also need to do a serious and thorough diagnostic to review a number of their core beliefs--their attitudes towards abortion, the working class, religion, and the use of American power have been mentioned in this thread. Also regionalism, as well--as someone who lives in Minnesota even I have resented the east coast and west coast attitudes present in the media towards the "flyover land" of the American midwest and south. The internet provides a venue of expression and the human spirit has a profound need to be heard. The media is also caught in the middle of this debate as people demand respect for their views and experience.

I'm a newbie to this blog though I've been reading for some time. What is absolutely clear is what Prof Rosen posted in his initial prompt, "There were no short answers. And there were no good answers. There were lots of confusing and hopelessly abstract answers."

I've got to get back to my life. Ciao!

Posted by: PTate in MN at October 25, 2004 11:41 AM | Permalink

The contention that our current state is driven in large part by the technological advance from movable type to Movable Type (TM) and the internet is consistent with Alven Toffler's long-held position that all major social revolutions -- from nomadic to aggrarian to industrial and so on -- are driven by technological innovations that reshaped how people relate to each other.

The other point of view is that these technological changes don't cause the change but, rather, reveal changes in character -- that is, they are opportunistic: circumstances don't make the man, they merely reveal him.

And I think the thing that is so different this year is our change of national character: a 'winner take all' mentality where the nation is a prize to win for a person, not a jointly held treasure which one person gets the priviledge of protecting. And because, as a nation, we have renounced every "outside" standard for moral behavior in our rush from any sort of guilt for anything, we are left with that most chilling of assessments: "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

The public now has, through the internet, greater access to information and individual public expression -- this is very different from control of "the truth," for without a standard by which to judge, it is like giving blind people access to thousands of balls with the charter to find the red one. This leads to confusion, not control.

And judgments are made on the only grounds available: style, personality, alignment with personal desires, desire for acceptance with friends ... all matters of taste rather than truth.

John Podhoretz finds this election "exciting." I find it dispairing -- because there is no standard for "right," speeches and debates and web sites make up for this lack with belligerence: all opponents are "idiots" or "scum" and all opposing ideas are "trash" and worse.

We are the blind leading the blind -- the fact that we are using the internet to do it is only incidental.

Posted by: C Bennett at October 25, 2004 11:42 AM | Permalink

Hmmm.

Darwin has come to journalism.

Journalism had been in an isolated existence with almost no serious competition. It now is in a changed environment where competition is increasingly a challenge.

Posted by: ed at October 25, 2004 11:50 AM | Permalink

It's the culture war, stupid. The faith-based have seized the initiative due to the war and the reality based opinion leaders see themselves going into a thirty year blackness. Therefore, they lose their principles and attack without quarter. The reality based followers have no defenses and thus have been whipped into a frenzy.

In passing, I read the PIPA report. I did not read their methodology. Didn't have to. It is a liberal hit piece on its face, despite the academic trimmings.

Posted by: Notherbob2 at October 25, 2004 11:52 AM | Permalink

There is one thing that occurs to me I haven't seen mentioned. The Internet has allowed many people with narrow fields of expertise to quickly disseminate their views on media output, and this has devastated the media's credibility.

For example, I'm an engineer, and when I read the work of most reporters covering science and technology I am utterly dumbfounded at the inaccuracies, distortions, and outright ignorance often displayed. I know their coverage of my area of expertise is appalling, but that is all I can be sure of by myself.

However, when lawyers, doctors, historians, political scientists, etc can all point out similar mistakes being made by the media in their particular fields, and when they can make their views widely known, the net result is the situation we see now: ordinary people take everthing they read and see from the MSM with a huge grain of salt. More and more people simply do not believe you anymore, and they have very good reason not to do so.

It is much easier to tear something down than it is to build its replacement, so I think we are currently in a place where the MSM is nearing complete collapse, but whatever will come next is nowhere near conception, much less completion.

Posted by: Kieran Lyons at October 25, 2004 12:06 PM | Permalink

Re: "I don't have to read it, I know it's a liberal hit piece..." Just curious: why such a lack of curiosity in what's topping the charts on the other guy's radio stations?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at October 25, 2004 12:12 PM | Permalink

PTate,

Thank you for your reply and critique of my thoughts on Wilsonian policy and categorizing Rosen's list.

Which construct one prefers reflects underlying assumptions about "reality".

Yes, there is more than one narrative that can be applied. Some narratives I think reflect assumptions more about "motive" than "reality". In other words, some narratives require more assumptions about the meta-physical influences and result in a map of reality based on a greater abstraction of "what's really going on". At some point such thinking becomes conspiratorial and grounded in the paranoid style of politics.

As an offering that our foreign policy has had a Wilsonian flare and more continuity than conventional media's amnesiac narrative: The Wilsonian Model of Foreign Policy & the Post-Cold War World. I would offer that Wilson's critics would not be unfamiliar with the accusation, "neo-colonial capitalist adventure."

I wasn't quite sure what you meant by "reality challenged". On the one hand "reality challenged" could mean that a leader has a vision of the future and is boldly, resolutely, leading to that future and some of us, the "reality challenged" lack the imagination to see the vision because the gap between our present "reality" and the vision is so great or because we will be losers in that "new reality". On the other hand, "reality challenged" could refer to the gap between the evidence, what is actually happening, and the rhetoric, spin and illusion.

Absolutely! And I think this is really a very important issue for discussion. Unfortunately it is often obscured and diminished by over-the-top rhetoric. In the comments to a previous essay, panopticon tried to make the distinction between reality-trashing vs. reality-avoiding (or absence of reality-testing). I think there is a philosophical approach and balance, even where it pertains to political endeavors.

Some of the debate over whether we did the right or wrong thing for the right or wrong reasons is academic, and some of it is not.

I never found the argument from the Right that Clinton was a sociopath worth my time. I don't find such arguments from the Left about Bush worthwhile either. I've also learned that I need a filter for the argument that never seem to change color, but only the direction from where they are being hurled. An example is how Republicans disparaged or promoted the unemployment rate statistic when a Democrat was President, and now Democrats parrot the same arguments against a Republican President: "It's not really 5.4%." (It never was or is.) "All those jobs are hamburger flipping and everyone has to work two jobs to survive." (Same was being said from 1994-1996, and after Bush 41's first term, Reagan's first term, ...)

Posted by: Tim at October 25, 2004 12:43 PM | Permalink

Thanks Jay for such thought provoking writing.
This is all fascinating stuff, but its still only touching 10% of the population, those that use the internet and read and think this much about words.

The effect on politicians and journalists and academicians, the word-elites, for losing their moral compass, is to lose the trust of the people.

Thus, where once anything the NYT or the "paper" published was given de facto credibility, now it has much less, or perhaps even a negative connotation.

Same with CBS after Rathergate.

Trust once lost takes a long time to be earned back.

I think the resulting search for other sources of news is the reason for the rise in talk radio and now blogs.

The failure of the liberal elite to "walk the walk" in journalism (loss of objectivity, public expressions of bias and deliberate misinformation) will only accelerate the alienation of the public from mainstream media.

What does that leave? Systems that pander to a point of view, blogs or sites that allow one to drink their own bathwater (Kos, Atrios, DU come to mind) and spew poison upon their enemies.

Thus we have growing distance between the citizens, and no incentive for closing that distance.

Scary.

Posted by: skeej at October 25, 2004 1:08 PM | Permalink

Tim,

And thank you, as well, for your civil response to my comments.

I never found the argument from the Right that Clinton was a sociopath worth my time. I don't find such arguments from the Left about Bush worthwhile either.
But it is a fascinating exercise to consider the possiblity. What is happening when some large proportion of the population starts "seeing" psychopathy in the behavior of their leaders? This is a very interesting question in its own right. I am surprised that curiosity about the meta-story hasn't overwhelmed at least some journalists. imho, the difference between the case against Clinton and the case against Bush is that the case for Bush is much stronger. Remember how the story of the Boy who cried Wolf turned out.

People assume I am a lefty because I say Bush shows signs of psychopathy. In fact, that is not the case--in other years, I would be considered a liberal Republican--but the strategy has become condemn the messenger because the message is unwelcome. This is a concrete example of some of what this thread is discussing. Ah, well, treading where angels fear to go is fraught with danger...

This is an excellent practice: "I've also learned that I need a filter for the argument that never seem to change color, but only the direction from where they are being hurled. An example is how Republicans disparaged or promoted the unemployment rate statistic when a Democrat was President, and now Democrats parrot the same arguments against a Republican President" and I try to follow it myself. I also try to assess the accuracy of the charges. Do the charges reflect a political gambit or some underlying "reality" (that word again!)? I assume you do as well. This is one of the reasons the internet is so fabulously useful. Dozens of sources, and I get to check for myself.

Posted by: PTate in MN at October 25, 2004 1:42 PM | Permalink

Jay, Re: "I don't have to read it, I know it's a liberal hit piece..." Just curious: why such a lack of curiosity in what's topping the charts on the other guy's radio stations?

This is rich -- have YOU read "Unfit for Command"?
I don't think you know who wrote up Kerry's first Purple Heart. I don't think you know of evidence to support Kerry's frequent claim to be in Cambodia on Christmas.
Kerry refuses to sign Form 180

You know, the respect for MSM goes down when there are "facts" out there that there seems little effort to present. Yep, the Naval Investigation says the "procedures were followed". That doesn't answer the charges. Oh, 30 years ago, yeah -- then why is the keystone of the campaign?

But the short answer is the missing standards of comparison - BEFORE results are known. 2 years ago, in 2002, if you KNEW Saddam could be overthrown for less than 2000 American deaths, would it be worth it?

It's not too much reality, it's too little willingness to express value judgements -- like mine that the Kerry advised running from Vietnam, after 1971, was a mistake. Because too many Asians died.

Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at October 25, 2004 2:39 PM | Permalink

Mr. Rosen: Your problem with BBC is connected to the fact that we Americans have discovered that the major media have been slanting the news for years. Rather is just the most egregious case since he was caught. Since BBC is hellaciously left wing you would have had liitle luck trying to discuss it with them.The bloggers may not all be "pros" but there is a better chance of getting the truth if you look around a lot. The majors are finished unless they wake up and sraighten out. But don't hold your breath.

Posted by: Fred Edwards at October 25, 2004 2:46 PM | Permalink

Never underestimate the power of the lazy consumer. Reading takes effort. Therefore, mainstream television news will survive. Joe Sixpack wants his news short, pithy, increasingly tailored to his individual political and/or social bent, and delivered by either a former ESPN talking head or a beautiful fantasy-quality woman. But maybe I'm just cynical.

Posted by: Jeff at October 25, 2004 3:05 PM | Permalink

And another thing....(i.e. hit submit too soon). What might fallout from the blogosphere, however, is something similar to the Brit phenomenon of TV presenters reading newspaper headlines on morning shows. Perhaps mainstream TV news will evolve into the visual tourguide of the daily blogosphere....

Posted by: Jeff at October 25, 2004 3:15 PM | Permalink

The internet is a democratizing force. Allow us to communicate and we will. We will run with rumor and stop to watch a disaster. We will tell everyone we what we think we understand about what we heard and saw.

Along the way to this sharing our institutions of Trust are found to be shallow and flawed. Instead of acting to improve and regain our Trust they betray us. They belittle the uncredentialed and act as gatekeepers to authority. This only increases our beliefs that we have been lied to all along and further errodes Trust.

The PIPA citation is an example. They propose a hypothetical (IF WE KNEW) and then challenge the Bush supporters for not responding correctly.

IF we knew then that things were different, then things now would be different. However, to take knowledge of the present and apply it before the act is to confuse and obfusticate. "Ya never know til ya know. Ya know" or "Ya never know til you find out"

The Duelfer reports makes clear that had we captured the top 50 of Saddam's Generals they would ahve confirmed our pre-war intelligence. The President said "Waiting until there is a clear and present danger is too late". He was right. Saddam had many chances to make clear his lack of weapons.

The PIPA report is simply another act of the credentialed trying to stuff the democracy Genie back into the bottle. They may as well have asked "If the oceans were red would ships float?"

An informed "many" are much better at anticipating and analyzing the future than the credentialed few. What is happening is that information is being democractized. The well informed are better able to assess information than the credentialed. This is a tectonic shift in knowledge and authority. I think there is a new book on this subject.

What is happening is democracy spreading thru to the world. It is messy, illogical, and wonderful. The future is best with widespread democracy. We do not need kings-dictators-tyrants to rule. We have tried that and only found slaughter and mass graves.

All of the goals we seek come thru a peaceful change of govt by democratic actions.

Posted by: Andy at October 25, 2004 3:24 PM | Permalink

Dearest Mary Ann:

I am so sorry that you are being held hostage by the Bush Administration. If I wore a rubber President Bush mask on our next date, could I enter into your "false reality?"

Respectfully,
A. Evil Neocon.

(P.S. to all: quoting T.S. Eliot is very classy, even if you "can't find the exact quote about reality." I am so impressed.)

Posted by: A. Evil Neocon at October 25, 2004 3:59 PM | Permalink

Tim,
I share PTate's reluctance to follow you down the path of saying Bush's Iraq policy "can only be described as Wilsonian." I also tend to agree with PTate's suggestion that imperialist colonialism is probably a better fit (thus my early comparisons of Iraq to the Filippine-American War and the Japanese occupation of Manchukuo).

I think in one's sense it is the very antithesis of Wilsonianism. In another sense, it can be connected to it in a way that is unflattering for either Wilson or Bush.

Insofar as Wilson was effectively the founder of the League of Nations and his project purported to create a world in which international law could replace military struggle as the arbiter of international conflict, Wilson is the devil incarnate for the neo-conservatives that have so far set the Bush foreign policy agenda. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld see international law as a shield of corruption and unilateralism as the only hopeful path to global reconfiguration that is to their liking. For Strauss, the universal state is also the devil incarnate. These people have built their lives around discrediting the ideas associated with Woodrow Wilson. Bush, as I'm sure you'll concede, even ran against them in 2000 as nation-building was identified with the misguided Clinton project. Clinton tactically did an end-run around the UN in Eastern Europe. The neo-cons have designed an entire world policy around the idea of discrediting international organizations and rebuilding the world on unilateral US military power. This is as far from a Wilsonian agenda as can possibly be imagined. A further twist is that the claim is no longer the spread of universal human rights, it is the spread of the particularist legacy of Western civlization so the civilizing mission comes back into the picture in a way the Wilsonian model purported to move beyond in its call for national soveriegnty around the world.

In the sense that the Wilson policy at Versailles was one of the most deeply hypocritical foreign policies in world history, Bush policy can be fairly compared to it. Wilson and the League of Nations spoke of popular and national sovereignty even as they carved up the middle east and handed it out to Britain and France, even as it let Japanese claims to Korea stand, even as it gave German colonies in China to the Japanese, even as it forced reparations and financial ruin on Germany that nearly guaranteed the radicalization of what was left of it after Versailles. In that sense, Bush and Wilson are comparable. But I don't suppose that's the sense in which you intended it.

Thomas Friedman could take the position you do. He is for multi-lateralism and the rule of international law. The neocons cannot. For them, the invasion of Iraq was a pretext and first step toward overthrow of the entire UN regime as we know it (Any Project for the New American Century writings make this abundantly clear).

Does this mean you share Friedman's goals rather than those of Cheney and Wolfowitz? If so, then why are you still with the president when Friedman has abandoned him?

To connect this to the media, Friedman is employed by the New York Times, promoting the war. Cheney has spend his whole term as vice-president demonizing the same New York Times that has been promoting the Iraq War in the name of international law. Because they just don't get it and want to give foreign countries a veto over US foreign policy. Shouldn't you be championing the New York Times as the advocate of your view in opposition to the Bush administration?

Posted by: Ben Franklin at October 25, 2004 4:17 PM | Permalink

"An informed "many" are much better at anticipating and analyzing the future than the credentialed few. What is happening is that information is being democractized. The well informed are better able to assess information than the credentialed. This is a tectonic shift in knowledge and authority....

What is happening is democracy spreading thru to the world. It is messy, illogical, and wonderful.

One of witty sayings floating around the internet --I think it is often attributed to Franklin--is that democracy is "like two hungry wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch."

I would certainly agree that the model of "democracy" embraced by Bush and his supporters is messy and illogical.

The jury is still out on whether "The well informed are better able to assess information than the credentialed." The internet gives people the notion that they are well-informed. They can look stuff up and find people who agree with them. Becoming convinced by a lie (eg, Saddam had WMD, Kerry is not a war hero), discovering that others share that false belief with others, loudly insisting that it is "true" because other people share that belief, pressuring/condemning the media because they won't endorse it, is not the same as being well-informed.

Posted by: PTate in MN at October 25, 2004 4:31 PM | Permalink

There was a comfort in the trend toward transnational progressivism (to generalize) that liberals are loath to give up. It fit well the "holiday from history" that we were all enjoying, and was moving along its merry way until September 11. The significant majority of mainstream media and academia, and liberals in general, have basically their whole lifelong worldview invested in this mindset. The rest of us, the great unwashed masses, without that precondition, see that approach as insufficient to addressing the problems we all face.

That concept rises up between the two sides like a wall. One side, the liberals, is trying to hold it up, thinking it will still provide a reference to navigate the world as they see it. The other side, the conservatives, sees it as a barrier to our common protection, and is trying to tear it down.

The mostly liberal press thinks that professional detachment serves to keep then impartial. In this sense, and in the sense that we are few of us absolutes, they are caught in the middle. At the same time, many are, subconciously or not, trying to hold the wall up. This creates an intellectual block which must be overcome.

This is a psychological couterpart to the business considerations mentioned above, and the technological progress pointed out, that the industry must cope with to remain relevant to the greatest number of customers.

Posted by: Bobby at October 25, 2004 4:40 PM | Permalink

Some of this discussion makes me think of Neil Postman's "Amusing ourselves to death" and "Technopoly" yes?

Posted by: Matt Jones at October 25, 2004 4:53 PM | Permalink

Regarding the PIPA report... It takes as an article of faith that the beliefs of Bush supporters are wrong. Say on the Iraq-Al-Quaeda question: 55% of Bush supporters believe that Iraq provided substantial support to Al-Quaeda, and 20% believe it was directly involved in 9/11. Of course they're wrong... or are they? Let's review">http://obsidianorder.blogspot.com/2004/10/saddam-and-al-quaeda-timeline.html">review some of the evidence first.

On closer examination, it turns out that "substantial support" is probably true, and that "direct involvement" is a distinct posibility (see Salman Pak and numerous meetings between the hijackers and Iraqi intelligence agents).

So, the problem with the "reality-based community" is that it isn't reality-based... at least when the evidence disagrees with their views.

Posted by: Obsidian at October 25, 2004 4:53 PM | Permalink

Ben Franklin,

I also tend to agree with PTate's suggestion that imperialist colonialism is probably a better fit (thus my early comparisons of Iraq to the Filippine-American War and the Japanese occupation of Manchukuo).

And mine to the Malayan Emergency, which you seem unwilling to discuss.

Insofar as Wilson was effectively the founder of the League of Nations ...

Let's talk first of Wilson's forays into Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

These people have built their lives around discrediting the ideas associated with Woodrow Wilson.

But only the legacy of Wilson's internationalist ideas that now conflict with US sovereignty and hegemony. Much more of Wilson's idealism has been adopted.

Bush, as I'm sure you'll concede, even ran against them in 2000 as nation-building was identified with the misguided Clinton project. Clinton tactically did an end-run around the UN in Eastern Europe.

That's a very interesting dichotomy, Ben. Dissonance? A recognition that the international Cold War structures were less relevant to both the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations in the post-USSR world? Clinton's only end-run was in Eastern Europe?

Ben, I don't understand why I can't have my position, which might differ from both Friedman's and Cheney's, or Wolfowitz et al.

Posted by: Tim at October 25, 2004 5:00 PM | Permalink

The Guttenberg/Luther analogy is dead on. And to raise the ante:

People forget that prior to the printing press, there were no libel laws, no copyright laws, etc. Back then, people were terrified by false assertions in anonymous pamplets. Composers,painters and authors had their works ripped off. Etc., etc. It took several centuries (I think!--be kind you law professor types: I am not a lawyer) before case law caught up with the technology.

We are sorting through the same issues, albeit digitally.

Posted by: Hepzi at October 25, 2004 5:05 PM | Permalink

"Re: "I don't have to read it, I know it's a liberal hit piece..." Just curious: why such a
lack of curiosity in what's topping the charts on the other guy's radio stations?"

This is one of the results of consolidation of media and media targeting towards groups. The idea that anything that does not please the reader contains no truth and therefore is not worth reading comes about partially because a) people don't want to read something that opposes them b) people feel they don't have time to read everything, and therefore want everything summarized or fed to them through their particularly ideological lens.

Though I don't defend the mainstream media wholly, the MSM now are a reflection of our participation (or lack thereof). Additionally we frequently don't understand the underlying
structures that make the media unreliable at times and attack it recklessly instead of
rationally.
#1) Journalism generally doesn't pay well (especially newspapers). You don't do it for money, and if you are...well, good luck becoming the next Ann Coulter.
#2) Speed. The news must come out relatively fast, and in topics which the reporter barely
has enough time to get a completely accurate view of the situation. This is natural in newspapers, and any bias generally is unintentional rather than intentional. This doesn't excuse reporters from getting it wrong so frequently, but to some extent, mistakes will be made even with the best reporting.
#3) Though it'd be ideal if they got science reporting more accurate, sometimes it may not be in our best interests to get the whole picture (for example: we'd probably be less likely to fund research in medicine if we knew the real likelihood of pharmacies creating a particularly good drug/embryonic stem cell arguments). If it were a more perfect society, then yes, it'd do us good to have more accurate information, but humans can only filter so much information before not having time to do anything else. While we should refer to experts on topics on the Internet, it creates the same problem of reliability as other media sources, just at faster speeds. On one hand, we can get expert opinions more quickly on topics rather than dealing with the extra lens of regular media, but it still has to be noted that experts also may have designs on information control.
More access to information/primary documents is good, but the problem most of the time still
is: Who is going to process that information for us (those who aren't experts?) Will this process make us believe that there's only one way to skin a cat all the time? Hence the importance in reading varied media sources on a regular basis rises.

I disagree with someone's assertion that the MSM is nearing collapse since television is still the
most popular medium, and probably will remain that way. Rather, segmentation of society
into ideological groups has come to the forefront, and the participation in society
(particularly via the internet) is probably the best way of dispelling the reporting of news in particular ideological bents. Hopefully, we'll see less of the segmented groups catered to in a 24 hour cable news society as time goes on as a result. At the very worst, the Internet and blogs may create a ready stream of more trustworthy pundits for the mainstream media than the current media. The future really is kind of murky here.

One more note: as the Internet becomes a more visual medium (more video clips), are we going to also have the same problem as television on the Internet? Are quickly disseminated video images on the net going to be a more powerful force than text on the Internet, and is this going to make the Internet simplistic like television for a new generation?

Prof. Rosen, I think every topics you bring up make more questions than answers rather than just having long answers.

Posted by: Steve at October 25, 2004 5:33 PM | Permalink

apologies for doublepost so fast.

"This is a psychological couterpart to the business considerations mentioned above, and the technological progress pointed out, that the industry must cope with to remain relevant to the greatest number of customers."

Now the question is whether our nation is divided enough that the industry can remain relevant to the greatest number of customers, or will it become more divisive in the interest of its partisan consumers and advertisers.

Posted by: Bobby at October 25, 2004 04:40 PM |
Some of this discussion makes me think of Neil Postman's "Amusing ourselves to death" and "Technopoly" yes?

Reminds me of Postman/Powers "How to Watch TV News" also that I had to read for a class I once took with Professor William Lutz, the guy who coined the term "doublespeak."

Posted by: Steve at October 25, 2004 5:40 PM | Permalink

Life is about pruning input to manageability, retaining sufficient detail to plan one's future. It's about a continuous process of checking our inputs and testing our conclusions.

As this comment thread amply reminds us. Conversations are slippery. They change levels and subjects by chance, by design, by maliciousness and for other reasons. But there is no reason for despair. Balance comes with practice, common sense, good hands on the reins, and a little help from our friends.

The internet is a wonderful new communication tool to help us. It can be double-edged, like a knife, which only means we use it carefully to use it well.

Several tasks are going on simultaneously. We are growing up individually, as friends, as a community, as a society, and as a world. Fortunately, the behavior that applies at one level is equally valuable on another. The requirements of journalism as communication are no different from other communication -- our reputations depend on how what we say stands up to scrutiny.

What we can know and how we can know it is, for the moment and perhaps for all time, unanswerable. Until we discover differently, we'll practice lashing together a sturdy lifeboat to keep ourselves afloat, understanding that Jay's diverse threads aren't so disparate after all.

Posted by: sbw at October 25, 2004 5:45 PM | Permalink

I don't think that the loss of confidence in MSM is new. People always knew that the newspapers in paricular, always promoted the views and interests of their owners and editors. Many papers, maybe most, were organs of political parties, ideologies or ethnical or religious groups. They were never objective.
It is a myth (promoted by MSM) they MSM conveys objectively and accurately just facts. That never was the case, and everybody knows that, and always did.

So, there is nothing new, nor anything alarming about the Media. They are what they are, what they have always been. People never accepted the interpretation of reality in the newspapers as undisputed fact. People built their own picture of the world according to the news they gathered from many sources, and their own judgement and world-view. That is what they are doing now too, only with the internet - many more sources are available.

The problem that is maybe somewhat new is twofold: the polarization of the people into distinct ideological camps, and the concentration of almost all MSM in one of those camps - i.e. lack of diversity in MSM.

Posted by: Jacob at October 25, 2004 6:00 PM | Permalink

Jacob:

I don't know if everybody knowing that the media aren't objective really matters so long as their effect on civic discourse and public debate exists. As you say, media concentration behind ideology is the important issue, and this issue trumps existing public distrust of media

However, people do accept media interpretations of reality as undisputed fact unless there's an obvious contradicting source. Even when there is an obvious contradiction, sometimes people still don't reform their worldviews. I've seen many examples of disconnect between stereotype and reality in spite of varied sources in my life. For instance, I've heard the phrases "You're not like other black people" or "You don't sound Asian" or "You can't be gay! (to someone who wasn't flaming)" etc. out loud from people who probably should know better. The internet's a great source to get varied information, and the new generation (as far as I can see) is trending towards more varied information, but this doesn't mean the easiness of stereotyping will go away. (The most interesting case I read recently was of a town making some anti-semitic protests and when an upstanding Jewish citizen of the town decided to leave, it never occurred to them he might be Jewish.)

"The problem that is maybe somewhat new is twofold: the polarization of the people into distinct ideological camps, and the concentration of almost all MSM in one of those camps - i.e. lack of diversity in MSM."

Pretty much, but it's not new at all (been happening for the last 30 years really), and I fear the Internet may fall into those camps if various sections and content are privatized (and if co-opted by the MSM in a manner bad to discourse). We have to watch out for big brother taking over the freedom of the nets. Recently a library in Florida banned some more liberal blogs as reported here:
http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2004/10/banned-in-florida.html

Posted by: Steve at October 25, 2004 7:06 PM | Permalink

I think this is the embodiment of the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times".

Just as SDB indicated we are in a period of transition not unlike that which occurred after moveable type was introduced. A lot of metaphorical walls are falling down and the old guard is rushing to the scene to try to hold back the hordes.

We are shifting from an old order to a new order, or if you like, an old paradigm to a new paradigm, but all the code words and devices of the new order/paradigm havent been created yet, we are in the midst of the chaos.

To add to the fun, it is my opinion that we will have a severe recession/depression in the next 8-12 years as Europe sees the catharsis of its social democratic welfare statism, and the US sees the catharsis of its overspending, credit card/mortage debt, no cash ways. Plus the undeniable demographic move of Babyboomers from investors to retirees, moving thier money from stock markets to bond markets. The only variable being the exploding economy of the emerging China and surrounding Asian Tigers.

Weeeeeeee

Posted by: Joel mackey at October 25, 2004 7:19 PM | Permalink

> "I don't have to read it, I know it's a liberal hit piece..." Just curious: why such a
lack of curiosity in what's topping the charts on the other guy's radio stations?"

A very practical reason, extending what Steve said above:
If I've already made up my mind, what's the marginal value for me in re-examining my conclusions? It takes time and work, and (since I only have one vote) it won't make any practical difference to my quality of life (particularly if I only discuss politics with those of like mind). And, if lack time or aptitude to evaluate competing claims, I'd be flipflopping depending on what I read last, and that's extremely uncomfortable.

I think the only way to restructure the conversation so that it _does_ pay the average citizen to be aware of both sides' arguments is to co-opt existing built-in human needs like social status - perhaps create some social institution that requires communing with unlike minds and ideas, e.g. a "political opposites" buddy system - find a wrongheaded thinker who you nonetheless like and respect as a person, then trade reading matter and discussion. Social status is gained by those willing to engage, lost by those who are not, and we move from competing sets of monologues to a dialog.

As I think Sean Bonner put it - you want a "friends dialog", where areas of agreement are explicitly acknowledged rather than ignored.

Otherwise the structural bias of human motivation to react(speak, blog, whatever) is such that when Claim Z from Side A is not responded to by Side B, it's not clear (to anyone but B) whether B agrees with the claim, didn't see it, or is just not sufficiently incensed to devote the time to refuting it.

Posted by: Anna at October 25, 2004 9:47 PM | Permalink

WARNING: Conservative argument ahead:

"It is a myth (promoted by MSM) they MSM conveys objectively and accurately just facts. That never was the case, and everybody knows that, and always did."

Divergence between ideal and execution does not argue for discarding the ideal.

Analogy (replace "science" with "journal" ):
The MSM are scientists. They revere and aspire to a Scientific Method, which is designed to optimize objectivity.

Unfortunately, due to time and other constraints they are extremely sloppy scientists, and (for structural reasons, and because institutions have psychological failings too) they hold themselves up to be better scientists than they actually are.

Now come the new agers, with new truths, saying "look at the MSM - science sucks - _WE_ are the ones with the truth - the MSM is dead, we'll decide what's true for ourselves".

And they seem rather unaware of the existence of a baby in the MSM bathwater.

Admittedly, it's a full tub, and the baby is smaller than the MSM would like you to believe - but the MSM's higher principles evolved for a reason, and we ignore the reason(s) at our peril.

To illustrate said peril, Barbara Tuchman on role of the press in the Dreyfus Affair (quoted in Squirrel Cage) -
"Variegated, virulent, turbulent, literary, inventive, personal, conscienceless and often vicious, the daily newspapers of Paris were the liveliest and most important element in public life. The dailies numbered between twenty-five and thirty-five at a given time. They represented every conceiveable shade of opinion... "

Posted by: Anna at October 25, 2004 10:12 PM | Permalink

Samizdata: "What got me gesticulating at my screen was [sbw's] casual dismissal of (in his chart about it all) of "the separate realities of Bush and Kerry supporters".

You misinterpret my "red herring" comment which referred to the pseudo science of the PIPA poll which makes it a poor foundation for ANY discussion.

Nor is there room for mumbo jumbo that tries to legitimize relativistic different worlds. That's magic. And magic is no basis for decision making and no basis for civilization. The red herring is to suggest there are legitimate separate realities.

When you say the "'separate reality' effect is one of the most important and portentous, and potentially disruptive effects of the Internet." I understand, but felt that Jay was referring to something else.

Posted by: sbw at October 25, 2004 10:38 PM | Permalink

What's fascinating about the Pipa Report is its commission of the very error of which it accuses Bush supporters: the report claims Saddam had no WMD's, when in fact he did.

What he didn't have was a WMD program.

Most Bush supporters correctly believe that Saddam had WMD's, and at the same time most (~75%) also believe, again correctly, that Saddam did not have a program to manufacture more of them.

Kerry supporters, to their credit, do not believe that Saddam was manufacturing WMD's, but they stumble when they believe that he did not HAVE WMD's.

Compounding the error are ridiculous "studies" couched in embarassingly smug academic language which not only claim that Saddam had no WMD's but ridicule those who know that he did.

This makes Bush supporters and "Bush World" closer to reality than "Kerry World". In "Bush World" Saddam had WMD's but not the capability to make more. "Kerry World", in the face of having half their reality blown to shreds by a 155mm sarin gas artillery shell, simply chooses to believe one of two very unpalatable rationalizations:

Believers in "Kerry World" either refuse to believe that Saddam had sarin gas, a discovery reported by the Iraqi Survey Group and confirmed by the BBC, or they do not believe that sarin gas is a weapon of mass destruction -- though it is 20 times deadlier than cyanide.

A most interesting (albeit horrendous) thought experiment would I think help one to ponder the relationship of "Kerry World" believers to the nature of sarin gas: would they call it a "WMD" if it were used by American forces?

Posted by: Pipa Unbound at October 25, 2004 10:39 PM | Permalink

NBC News: Miklaszewski: “April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq.”

Old news as new news?

Posted by: lucklucky at October 25, 2004 11:19 PM | Permalink

sorry didnt refered from where it came from

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/002859.php

and it was msm correcting msm

Posted by: lucklucky at October 25, 2004 11:23 PM | Permalink

I didnt see where in the pipa report they asked Kerry supporters if they believed there were mass graves in Iraq, and whether they felt responsible for any of the mass graves... I mean we had him "contained" he couldnt kill more than a few million more people.

Also I am curious, are the people using the no WMD argument as cause Bush was wrong to go to war, also the people calling for sanctions to end due to the MILLIONS of Iraqi babies that were dieing just prior to the war?

I know this reality is probably populated with Bush supporters, you know the one where Democrats were complaining about the billions of dollars we were spending having the no fly zones and containing Iraq, as a secondary argument for ending the sanctions that were killing millions of babies.

I find it a bit disingenuous when Kerry supports try to point back at the "containment" as cause to maintain the status quo...it feels like that time after the first WTC attack when people pointed at the bombers and said, "we got em, we got em, nothing more to worry about, just go about your daily lives, and remember to vote Democrat, cuz Terrorism is just a nuisance, and while we are going to declare war on Terroism, we are really only going to treat it as a policing problem except when politically advantageous" (slight amount of paraphrasing).

Posted by: Joel Mackey at October 25, 2004 11:38 PM | Permalink

Effects of Blogs/The Daily Show: Critical Thinking

One of the key effects of The Daily Show and bloggers is they serve as a vaccine to promote critical thinking. They have enough B.S. that readers/viewers are forced to think critically in a way that they don't have to with traditional journalism. Ideally in traditional journalism, the news is delivered by the Credentialed, Objective Reporter and is Accurate and Unbiased. The Truth is right here, folks, you can trust what we said, no analysis necessary. The Daily Show, on the other hand, has real news mixed with fake news. Viewers have to have their brains turned on at least enough to sort out which is which. They have to analyze what they hear, or they risk feeling like gullible morons. Likewise, the blogs, especially the comment sections, tend to have people making wild, biased claims and spreading unsourced rumors. People who want to figure out what's going on have to learn to think critically, evaluate sources, ask for links, etc.

Posted by: ErikaEM at October 26, 2004 12:31 AM | Permalink

More Blog Effects: Scrutiny

I think a big part of the drop in the trust in media is that the internet gives people a much greater ability to scrutinize the media, leading to much more catching of mistakes. Journalists are only human, they’re on deadline, and they’re going to make mistakes. Unfortunately for them, they have to be right all the time, or they get jumped on. No human can be perfect, but the objective, faceless, opinionless, ideal journalist isn’t supposed to be human.

Journalists have been making mistakes for a long time, but the blogs let us catch them a lot more. The blogs can do a sort of "wikijournalism" (see www.wikipedia.com for an example of the wiki phenomenon), where a whole slew of people each put a little effort into finding out about a topic. The result is the quick assembly of a pool of knowledge that would take a single reporter a long time to put together. Bloggers find and accumulate the best work of regular reporters, too, so what's available through the blogosphere can be the best of the MSM. Of course there's a lot of nonsense (Sturgeon's law: 95% of everything is cr*p), but there's so much stuff that there's a lot of good information, too. As a result bloggers are comparing article X to the combined research of bunches of people and the best everybody else in the MSM has to offer. I don’t think anyone could compare favorably to that.

Another problem is that the requirement that reporters be objective puts them in an impossible position. For many people "unbiased" or "objective" means "you agree with me." When journalists do their job and report something that doesn't fit with reader Y's bias, they get whacked for being... biased. Also, people notice and comment upon what the press does that they don’t like. Rarely do I see the media being praised for what they do right, and I never see a post saying, “Wow, that post was so biased toward my guy.” It isn’t bias if I agree with it, you see.

Posted by: ErikaEM at October 26, 2004 12:31 AM | Permalink

Replacing the traditional authority:

The problem with the objective, valueless standard for journalists is it’s a standard for a machine, not a human. In fact, in the print media, at least, what you trust and turn to is the news organization, not the people who actually write the stories. Off the top of my head, I can’t tell you who wrote what I read in the paper. What bloggers are pointing out is that the press is made of human beings who do have opinions and biases, and who make mistakes. I think the news standard needs to incorporate humanity and values.

One of the things I’ve noticed about blogs is that people’s passions come out, and that makes them a lot more interesting, frankly, than reading the “objective” news. Biases come with those passions, but they’re biases I know about and can compensate for. I would be curious to see a news source that tried to do a comprehensive report (bloggers’ interests can be a little narrow) by turning journalists loose to follow the stories they care about and that they think I would want to know about, too. (think www.back-to-iraq.com) Traditional reporters may well care a lot about their subject, but that doesn’t come through to me the reader. I would like to read articles written by people who clearly care about their subject matter. I want to have a personal connection to the news, even if it’s only that I know the person writing the story. My news is being filtered anyway, I want to see the person doing the filtering. Writing in the first person is fine, and it’s more honest, anyway.

One of the things I don’t like about current journalism is that each day’s newspaper and each story is largely separated from those before it, after it, and around it. I’d like to see the separate stories and the separate days connected into a larger picture. The danger here is that the reporting would be manipulated to support a particular viewpoint, but that could be avoided. Also, what is newsworthy would change drastically, but that might be a good thing.

Posted by: ErikaEM at October 26, 2004 12:32 AM | Permalink

Credibility of Jon Stewart:

I think one of the reasons Jon Stewart is so credible is that the bar is set so low for him. He's a comedian. We aren't expecting a top quality news source, we're expecting to laugh. I think if he were in charge of a serious show, people would be a lot less impressed. I might be wrong, though, because his credibility comes from other sources, too. The impression I've gotten from watching interviews of him is that he genuinely and deeply cares about what he’s saying, and he’s angry about the mess much of the media is making of the public discourse. He's very perceptive, he's looking at the media and politics at an unusually deep level, and he can use humor to say things people would have a hard time coping with if the tone was more serious. What also struck me was his lack of ego, willingness to look at other points of view, and respect even for the people he skewers. When he was on C-SPAN the interviewer asked him what he would ask President Bush if he could, and Stewart responded by saying some thing along the lines of "what am I missing?" or "what do other people see in you that I don't?" His point was that Bush is doing well in the polls, his people are intensely loyal to him, and Stewart doesn't get why. It is incredible to find someone whose reaction in that situation is not "They're all morons, they don't see that Bush is terrible," but rather, "They must see something I don't." Hats off, Mr. Stewart.

Posted by: ErikaEM at October 26, 2004 12:32 AM | Permalink

Prof. Rosen, like others have mentioned on this thread, I am looking forward to your synthesis of the rich brew of comments generated by your initial prompt.

Once I read an article about the creation of knowledge. I can't remember the author, but it was published in 1965. It claimed (very cheerful and positive) that all the knowledge of the world--recorded documents--doubled between the start of writing and 1750, and doubled again between 1750 and 1900, and doubled again between 1900 and 1950, 1950 and 1960, and 1960 and 1965. You get the picture. So I tried to figure out, whimsically--at that exponential rate of growth--when all the knowledge of the world would double in a nanosecond. It was December 31, 1969.

I drew two conclusions from this exercise. The first was that one should never casually project exponential rates of growth. The second was that there is lots and lots of information created in the world, more than anyone can comprehend.

Surely the internet has just exacerbated this! In the best threads, a new perspective emerges from all that information, the multiple voices and contributions. For those of us who are cognitive junkies, the immediacy of the conversation is compelling. The media--print, radio, TV--are being drawn into that conversation as participants. I read the NYTimes, for example, to establish events that have occurred in Iraq over the past 24 hours, I'll review commentary and confirm events in several other papers and I read Juan Cole's analysis as well. Then I'll see what the bloggers are saying, and within a blog, the comments. I'll read your blog to check a journalist's perspective on the media. Then I'll check this week's Onion and laugh at their take ("America finishes strong second in Iraq"). It gets very embedded. What I want from the media is not interpretation, but "facts"--"50 Iraqi soldiers were killed today." "Elections in Afghanistan occurred without disruption." The problem, of course, as the comments in this thread have said over and over, is that out of the billions of events occuring between now and tomorrow, which "facts" are worth attending to? Two people, presented with the same event, may attend to very different facts, and can get very cranky when their facts are not reported.

Anyhow, thanks for a thought-provoking conversation.

Posted by: PTate in Mn at October 26, 2004 1:06 AM | Permalink

" Ideally in traditional journalism, the news is delivered by the Credentialed, Objective Reporter and is Accurate and Unbiased. The Truth is right here, folks, you can trust what we said, no analysis necessary."

Sarcasm aside, this is what MSM beleives about itself. This is the ideal. They readily concede that, due to human imperfection, they sometimes fall short of acheiving the ideal, but they declare this is their ideal, and they would like us to beleive they are close to it.

This is false, and we all know it. MSM harbors false pretenses.

It's not just mistakes that prevent the objective rendering of facts. The process of perceiving the facts and reporting them is filterd (necessarily) by the reporter's beleifs and attitudes, and then filterd again by the editor's. There is no way that unfiltered news can reach people except those few cases where they are themselves eye witnesses.

The question is: has the MSM some advantages over bloggers ? Is there something that makes them consistently more trustworthy or objective ? The answer is: no. They are maybe no more, but surely not less biased than bloggers.

There is no magic bullet. There is no definite news source. There is no place you can go and read "the facts, just the facts" and be exempt from the mental effort of trying to corroborate and confirm and understand them. There cannot be such a place.

Posted by: Jacob at October 26, 2004 2:56 AM | Permalink

Well, quite a few bloggers recognize the power mainstream media does have which is probably why I see so few blogs actually going after the institution itself, but calling for reform, and for the institution to run more corrections. They ought to run corrections more often, but they probably fear doing so since it can offset their authority and influence. Now only if we could get the media to run corrections more often...(gasp! blogs!)

What advantages do they have? Access to sources, infrastructure, money, and tools that the average blogger doesn't have. Do you think the average blogger could be sent to foreign countries to blog report on a situation? Does the average blogger get press credentials and access to the same research materials as a WaPo or NYT reporter? Of course not. Reporters also have access to other media entities and have the ability to reach more people than blogs. They also believe in reforming the problems within the institution of journalism, but it's a difficult task to accomplish. Journalists (due to ethical concerns) are crippled where as bloggers have a certain amoung of freedom journalists lack.

Blogging is whatever the person running the blog wants it to be: reporting, correcting media mistakes, technology oriented, etc. etc. Blogging, while we trust those with a more authoritative stances also can let us fall into the trap of not perceiving things from more than one angle. The term "separate realities" is not always false. Quite often, the facts are there, and they can be interpreted differently according to priorities (case in point, the Duelfer report).

I don't think any news source actually believes their accounts are 100% unbiased, but it is a goal worth striving for in most instances. The goal of most journalists is to prevent bias (though the structure of most news itself is worth looking at as well), and like I said earlier, it's usually due to deadlines or carelessness that bias does come through. We're talking actual reporting here and not in editorials btw.

And for anyone who believes they can get away with any one or even two news sources today, I pity and envy them for their ability to shut off differing viewpoints.

Posted by: Steve at October 26, 2004 3:52 AM | Permalink

Jay, "Separate Realities" lent itself to some ambiguity that might be worth addressing in a post sometime.

They can be used to insulate a point of view from criticism -- religions frequently invoke a protective carapace to protect them from scrutiny. They can be used by intent to confuse others, or by mistake to confuse yourself.

Not just journalists, but every level of interaction is affected -- individual, social, political. Earlier I wrote Lies:

"Nothing ticks me off more than a lie. A lie cheats everyone -- the one who tells it, the one who hears it, the community at large. A lie is permanent. Its effect lasts forever."

But my vision of the scope of the problem was too small.

Posted by: sbw at October 26, 2004 7:52 AM | Permalink

Whilst diversity has developed at one end of the spectrum, at the other there is the increasing centralisation of viewpoint which has been facilitated by media deregulation. The perameters of discourse in the mainstream media shrank. Large chunks of the population who were once content that their voices were being represented found themselves marginalised. Technology has enabled us to counterweigh the media superstore with a multiplicity of little market stalls for those who do not wish to buy the homogenised, poor quality product of the corporate media. The mainstream is toxic with disinformation and uncorrected errors. The blogosphere plays (amongst other things) a filtration role. It is possibly the only organ of filtration currently working in the media body. It addresses not only the content of the mainstream media, but the mechanisms of production, the ideology behind it and the nature of its discourse. Jon Stewart and Air America play a role in this too, and are ideologically affiliated with discourse in the blogosphere. Jon Stewarts recent comments on crossfire were greeted with glee by bloggers because he spoke for us, he subverted the show’s hegemonic discourse, he refused to play their game.

Media deregulation was designed to allow corporations to take full advantage of technology that enabled conglomeration. The same technology in other hands has enabled the fragmentation and dispersal of ideas. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Behind all of this is political polarisation, but whats behind that? How much do the countervailing tendencies of the mainstream versus the cottage industry media reflect the political landscape and how much do they shape it?

As an ex-media student It fascinates (and gratifies) me just how much the subject has entered into public discourse over recent years. There has been growing awareness that there really is no such thing as a neutral position. The Internet has fostered consumer sophistication alongside increased access to the means of production.

I’m sure academic discourse has moved on since I was a student, but isn’t postmodernism the key to all of this? You either embrace the dispersal of authority, of ideas and perspectives or you react with insecurity and confusion. Fox watching Bush voters fall into the latter category. They feel the loss of an authoritative voice, there is too much information for them. Without a heirarchical framework they do not know how to measure its meaning or value. The internet is a postmodern invention. If postmodernism is the ultimate expression of democracy, then they are actually reacting against democracy itself. Participating in a democracy has become more complex - too complex for some, hence their attraction to Bush - the great simplifier. This is clear from the PIPA report. The Bush voters ignorance of global discourse and apparent ignorance even of Bush’s own policy positions seems shocking in the context of the mass of information available but is actually symptomatic of it, what the report’s authors referred to it as ‘cognitive dissonance’:

To support the president and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance, and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about prewar Iraq.”

They are complicit in their own disinformation. Its an unpleasant idea, but perhaps corporatism answered a need in people who feel overwhelmed by too much information and too many choices. The notions of truth and reality themselves have become fluid. Whose truth, whose reality? I think we are witnessing the backlash to postmodernism. What comes after postmodernism? Where is all this leading? This is the socio-political battle of our times. We can regress to the comfort of an authoratative uber-parent or we can try and find new forms of community structured around connections that are based on values, beliefs, ideas, ideals or interests rather than biology and location, but which address isolation, alienation and the insecurity they invoke.

We will, and are evolving new ways of treating the multiplicity of information - the blogosphere has developed its own interlinked pyramidical structure, with large readership blogs feeding down to smaller ones, and same-sized blogs linking to each other. The blogs at the top of the pyramid are developing links with the mainstream media - Markos Moulitsas now writes for the Guardian, various bloggers appear regularly on Air America and stories feed up from the blogosphere to the mainstream media, as the ‘Is Bush wired?’ story recently did. National papers are reaching global audiences - the Guardian now has more online readers in the US than print edition readers in the UK. Even regional papers reach wider audiences as their stories are dispersed via the blogosphere. Blogs are affecting the structure of the mainstream media. Here again concepts of community are shifting from the geographical to the ideological. Even if the nightmare scenario happens and Bush gets returned to office, it would not stop the momentum of this process. Opposition to the Bush administration has provided an ideological rallying point in the blogosphere, it has actually fostered its growth and coherence. Authority may have been dispersed, but facts are still facts. There is still a ‘real’ reality and as the PIPA report demonstrates it is the reality of the Kerry supporters, the global community and the UN.

Posted by: Gail Thomas at October 26, 2004 8:22 AM | Permalink

Jay: What I really wanted to say to the BBC guy was: There's too much reality rushing over us every day just now.

I would offer a qualitative theme to your quantitative conundrum: ambiguity.

Ambiguity is the crack in the journalist's armor and the underlying current that foments disagreement between ideological camps. Ambiguity is the propagandist's wedge, dividing "Truth", our perceptions of reality and giving birth to authoritative voices and their critics.

Philip L. Graham: "So let us drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never understand."

Posted by: Tim at October 26, 2004 10:12 AM | Permalink

Toward a field theory of journalism:

... The narrative theory asserts that journalists apply a narrative structure to ambiguous events in order to create a coherent and causal sense of events.

The narrative theory is rather weak because we could apply it to nearly every discoursive practice. Isn't this exactly what we do when we create myths, tell lies, and woo lovers? I think it's certainly important to understand the role of story-telling in journalism, especially because so much of what goes wrong in journalism may be traced to the automatic, or uncritical, practice of telling stories.

Posted by: Tim at October 26, 2004 10:19 AM | Permalink

One quick thought: The unattainable Holy Grail of the idealists is that blogging or the Internet via some (killer?) app will do away with ambiguity and PROVE who are the gatekeepers of "Truth".

Posted by: Tim at October 26, 2004 10:39 AM | Permalink

"it's usually due to deadlines or carelessness that bias does come through."

False. Bias is built in. It cannot be otherwise.
Why ? Here is why:
"... The narrative theory asserts that journalists apply a narrative structure to ambiguous events in order to create a coherent and causal sense of events."

Posted by: Jacob at October 26, 2004 11:32 AM | Permalink

However, that bias tends not to be toward liberal or conservative, but rather towards whatever inherent narrative structures in the media already exist. I never said the media was unbiased, but I was pointing out that bias isn't intentional. As pointed out, it's structural, and will remain structural. The problem is that the natural end of your beliefs may end in the destruction of journalism rather than reformation. Bias exists because we're human. We're bored by chronicle, we like narratives. What do you want? Never to reach for an ideal? Never to strive for something because it's unattainable? Who's to say that a narrative can't tell the truth in a manner society deems acceptable? I don't disagree with you entirely, but the problem is finding a solution, not just pointing out a problem.

Posted by: Steve at October 26, 2004 12:17 PM | Permalink

doublepost with a minor correction to last post -In general , there's no intentional bias on the part of the reporter...

Posted by: Steve at October 26, 2004 12:18 PM | Permalink

Again a complete dodge. Who says the stories aren't critical? In fact that's what these critics don't like about the press. The ones that aren't relativist that is.

Posted by: Jim Jones at October 26, 2004 12:45 PM | Permalink

Jay:

How does the latest from CBS look from your seat? A major media organizaiton trying to influence an election 36 hours before the polls open? How does this compare with the Sinclair scenario?

This Fager fellow is shameless in relating the CBS plan to put this out at the last minute, in a flagrant attempt to inflame voters by embarassing Bush & Rumsfeld in a way that precludes any kind of rebuttal.

Which class at Columbia School of Urinalism do you or your colleagues teach where this kind of crap is advocated? And we should have some respect for these people as members of a "profession" -- with standards and principles -- WHY???? Give me a break...

From the LA Times (10/26/04):

"Breaking the story would have been a welcome coup for CBS News as it seeks to emerge from the cloud cast by its use of unverified documents in reporting on President Bush's 1970s military service.

Instead, CBS was relegated to airing a report Monday evening, and "60 Minutes" merely got credit in the newspaper, which ran an unusual box noting that the article "was reported in cooperation with the CBS News program '60 Minutes.' '60 Minutes' first obtained information on the missing explosives."

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of "60 Minutes," said in a statement that "our plan was to run the story on [Oct.] 31, but it became clear that it wouldn't hold, so the decision was made for the Times to run it."

"That's what happened, and it was only fair to credit them," said Lawrie Mifflin, executive director of television and radio for the New York Times.

Both organizations declined to comment further. People familiar with the situation, who asked not to be identified, said the source on the story first went to "60 Minutes" but also expressed interest in working with the newspaper. The two media organizations have worked together in the past and agreed to join forces again."

Look in the mirror Jay -- then ask your MSM colleagues how they have sunk so low that this is considered kosher. It helps us understand our democracy right?

Plus the LA Times calls the forged Burkett documents "unverified", like they still might prove to the real McCoy. How stupid do they think we are not to see this kind of tripe for the one-sided advocacy it clearly is?

And once again we have an anonymouos source -- no word on whether this source is related to the Kerry campaign.

CBS = failure to learn

Posted by: Evor Glens at October 26, 2004 1:16 PM | Permalink

Evor Glens,
It's so annoying when reality seeps in before an election. God forbid we might find out what our government has been hiding from us before we have to vote on whether or not we want more of the same.

It's the Bush administration that has been suppressing these facts for almost a year now. Talk to your leader, not CBS.

Posted by: Ben Franklin at October 26, 2004 1:48 PM | Permalink

"-In general , there's no intentional bias on the part of the reporter..."

True (but only in general... , see the post by Evon Glens above).

But let's give the reporters credit: they try to be balaced. It's ok that they try. They should try. But this by no means proves that they succeed, and reporting is unbiased. It also doesn't mean that we should accept MSM reports at face value by default and suppose they are true and unbiased. They are not.

Take as example NYT Public Editor Daniel Okernt. On Oct 17 he published a column claiming the NYT coverage of the election is balanced and unbiased. How does he know it: he received complaints form the right, but also from the left, so he thinks he must be ok. Now Okernt is a Democrat, as he states, the NYTimes is a liberal paper (surprise!) - that he concedes too. The NYT has ednorsed Kerry. Yet Okernt claims the coverage of the campaign is balanced!! You must be deeply immerged in your own "narrative" to make such a bizarre claim.

I do not expect the NYT to be unbiased. I am aware of their bias and I discount for it. I don't hold it against them. But how could Mr. Okernt make such a claim in good faith is beyond me. He lives in a parallel universe, and he is not aware of it.

There is no way bias can be eliminated from the press (or blogs).

"but the problem is finding a solution, not just pointing out a problem."

Not every problem has a satisfactory solution. I think we can live perfectly well with the biased media as it exists - the key is diversity - we need to have many outlets, hoping their bias will cancel mutually, and some truth can emerge.

Posted by: Jacob at October 26, 2004 2:06 PM | Permalink

(courtesy of Atrios)
And It Continues...

Free airtime for candidates in California. *Republican* candidates, that is.

Attempting to boost Republican Party prospects, the owner of a chain of Central Valley television and radio stations has donated $325,000 in air time for GOP candidates in many of the state's hottest legislative elections.

The contribution by Harry J. Pappas comes in the final days of campaigning, and those involved in the campaigns could not recall another instance in which a California media mogul donated time on public airwaves for advertisements to benefit one party over another.

Critics say the contribution is a clear attempt to sway close elections, is likely to raise new questions of media bias, and violates federal law requiring broadcasting companies to provide equal time to political candidates.

"They're the public's airwaves," said attorney Karen Getman, who represents the Assembly Democratic Caucus and formerly served as chairwoman of the state's Fair Political Practices Commission. "You're not free to give them to one side in a partisan debate."

http://www.fresnobee.com/local/story/9335975p-10243105c.html

Posted by: Ben Franklin at October 26, 2004 2:39 PM | Permalink

The thing is, we believe what we want to believe. So the wanting is more important or fundamental than the belief. Facts are true if we want them to be true. Facts are false if we want them to be false. These days, it's almost impossible to prove or disprove facts.
The only thing I know that's true is what I experience first hand. Everything I hear or read that is secondhand or thirdhand can not be accepted as true because there's the possibility that it has been distorted by filters caused by the other's desires.

Posted by: Alda at October 26, 2004 3:06 PM | Permalink

Hey Ben:

So to address my actual argument, you see no difference between the Sinclair case where the media outlet actively sought to air their story well before the election, actively seeking a rebuttal from the candidate, vs. the CBS case I cited where the producer intended to air his story without any context or rebuttal, just before the polls open?

And by the way, the facts you are so certain of have been largely discredited.

As usual, when your unbalanced snarky comments are rebutted, I do not expect you will reply to this message either.

Not much you can say is there?

Posted by: Evor Glens at October 26, 2004 3:25 PM | Permalink

Evor,
I disagree with your characterization on almost every point. Several weeks before the election, the Sinclair broadcast of Stolen Honor as originally conceived was MORE likely to influence the election if the reaction to the LA Times story on Schwarzenegger is any precedent.

Your "actively seeking rebuttal" is my "actively seeking to set up a hit job". Nothing Sinclair has done to date absent the threat of stockholder lawsuits suggests anything to the contrary. I think Jay called that one pretty accurately and I have little to add to his description. The best case for your side is that Jay suggests Sinclair was using the CBS 60 Minutes model.

If you are referring to the facts on the high-explosives report, either the administration has been deliberately hiding their loss of the weapons for over a year, or they have been pressuring the Iraqis not to tell the IAEA or the press about the weapons so that the people who stole them won't know they have them? It doesn't sound very discredited to me.

Josh Marshall on the case:
"Okay, now can we say that the NBC Nightly News report that the explosives at al Qaqaa were already gone when the first US troops arrived -- the one Drudge goaded CNN into running with far harder than NBC ever did -- is now officially no longer operative?

Earlier we noted that MSNBC had interviewed a member of the NBC news crew that was embedded with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade, which visited the al Qaqaa facility on the April 10th, 2003.

She said they didn't do any search. They were there on a "pit stop" on the way to Baghdad..."

Jim Miklaszewski on MSNBC:
"Now, Pentagon officials say U.S. troops and members of the Iraq Survey Group did arrive at the Al QaQaa compound on May 27. And when they did, they found no HMX or RDX or any other weapons under seal at the time. Now, the Iraqi government is officially said that the high explosives were stolen by looters."
www.talkingpointsmemo.com

Posted by: Ben Franklin at October 26, 2004 3:46 PM | Permalink

Jim Jones:
"Commenters here don't seem to have a clue about the journalistic process. Reporters are very limited in what they can say. It's writing by committee really...."

Count me as one of the clueless here. Any examples on web showing the reporters' submissions juxtaposed against what actually got published? I'd be interested.

BTW, nice article in Christian Science Monitor by Deborah Tannen summarizing the faults of journalistic practice and what they've done to political discourse -
We need higher quality outrage

Posted by: Anna at October 26, 2004 3:58 PM | Permalink

Tim,
Your suggestion that the Malayan Emergency is a useful analogy to the current Iraq occupation is an intriguing one. I think it fails for reasons I will elaborate, but it is a serious and interesting suggestion.
I would have responded to your suggestion earlier, but I was unfamiliar with the issue and didn't have the time to check up on it. I come up with the following:
The PKI fought against the Japanese in alliance with the British during W.W.II. The humiliating way in which the Japanese defeated the British undermined white supremacy in the region, but despite some expectations of independence, the British insisted on reconstituting Malaya as their colony after the war. At that point the PKI began terror resistance against British colonial plantation owners.
I think your example strengthens my argument that Iraq is a colonial or neo-colonial situation. You are offering the defense of a British colony as an example of why Iraq is not a colony. They tried and failed to maintain direct British rule and ended up maintaining it by setting up figurehead Malayan rulers who passed judgment on the religious issues that were undermining British legitimacy.
The suggestion that the Malayan Emergency was a successful foreign/colonial attempt to put down a terror/resistance campaign of more local origin is a more plausible one, though still problematic. There was some support for the restoration of British rule given the understanding that it would lead to independence. The British initially dashed those hopes.

The primary reason the PKI failed was the lack of appeal a Marxist revolutionary movement had for the enormous muslim population. The resistance in Iraq is not communist. There are radicalized Sunnis in Iraq who could quite easily ally themselves with the Wahabbists. We have managed to radicalize the Shiites as well. To draw the parallel with Iraq and Malaya from my perspective, it is as if the British authorities had set out to defeat the PKI and in the course of the campaign managed to antagonize the muslim Malayans who despised the PKI. The fact that the British overthrew the hated Japanese does not mean that they would be able to actively and militarily suppress resistance from the PKI AND the muslim population at large. For me, the analogy breaks down pretty fundamentally. But it IS an interesting idea. Thanks for the suggestion.

The British did try the independence card in Malaya (a little too late) with some effectiveness. They also supported Suharto (as did the US in neighboring Indonesia) whose anti-communist pogrom took the lives of 500,000. My reading is that the Malayan territory didn't face the kind of ethnic strife that led to the disasters in Indonesia and Iraq (Adding the body counts from Saddam, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 ut together). I'm expecting the worst in Iraq (a fall of Saigon type ignominious exit) and the example of the Malayan Emergency does not lead me away from that view.

Posted by: Ben Franklin at October 26, 2004 4:10 PM | Permalink

Thanks to Jay Rosen for an extremely thought-provoking post.
Thanks also, from this reader to those who have commented; some observations are thought-provoking in their own right, but collectively it is:
a.) Interesting how convincingly they support the conclusion of the PIPA study (which, after all, was that Bush and Kerry supporters live on different planets).
b.) Fascinating how both sides tend to a certain bloggish triumphalism -- while mostly confining themselves to commenting on what the MSM deigns to have noticed.

Posted by: johne at October 26, 2004 4:39 PM | Permalink

Yo Ben:

My original post today was intended to highlight what appears to be a particulary egregious attempt by CBS to time the airing of their "explosives bombshell" to occur at a time when it would create maximum heat -- for Bush, without regard for whether it also created any light -- for voters. Nothing you say has addressed this directly, except possibly the obscure reference to Arnold. My recollection is that the LA Times worked on that story for many months, and then "suddenly" got the right anonymous source lined up to run the harrassment claims in the final week before the recall election. Their long-running support for that idiot, Gray Davis, had nothing to do with that story, I am sure.

And by the way, we could argue all day about the facts of this lost weapons story, and while I suspect it is largely overblown (a view strengthened by the fact CBS did not want to run it when a reasoned rebuttal might have a chance to get on the air before it had its' desired effect on the election), I do not beleive you or I -- or even Josh -- have enough data yet to get to a clear picture.

Your absolute certainty about the perfidious motives and character of anyone with whom you disagree is a serious character issue. It must be lonely to be so rightous...

Posted by: Evor Glens at October 26, 2004 4:58 PM | Permalink

Ben Franklin,

Thanks for the well reasoned reply. You are, of course, correct that the Malayan Emergency does not map directly to the situation in Iraq. You are also correct to look to the larger region (Indonesia) but I think you may have confused Indonesia's PKI, Sukarno's republicans, Kartosuwirjo's Darul Islam and the Dutch with the Chinese/Indian/Malay/British.

You are offering the defense of a British colony as an example of why Iraq is not a colony.

Actually, no, but at this point I think the debate over the semantics (and semantics can be meaningful) of whether occupied Iraq is more like a protectorate or colony or territory is moot for examining the current violence by Arabs and Iraqis against Iraqis and coalition forces.

The resistance in Iraq is not communist.

I agree, this resistance is not ideologically driven by the same dogma that drove the communist movement in Asia. What I have read is there is an unhappy alliance in Iraq coalesced around preventing an Iraqi government mid-wifed by the coalition. So the resistance is not only NOT communist in the same sense, but it is also not homogenous in the same way.

The primary reason the PKI failed was the lack of appeal a Marxist revolutionary movement had for the enormous muslim population.

This definitely sounds more like Indonesia. But I think the British were successful in Malay because the communist terrorists were not popular among the Malayans or Indians and the British resettled the Chinese famers via New Villages. Then negotiated a political solution that became the Alliance Party/National Front.

This is where I think the reporting becomes so important, and as Jay points out, it is too narrow (ambiguous), a tool for terrorists/combatants and [t]here's too much reality rushing over us every day just now.

I'm expecting the worst in Iraq (a fall of Saigon type ignominious exit) and the example of the Malayan Emergency does not lead me away from that view.

I'm not interested in the Malayan Emergency analogy because it is a match for what the coalition and Iraqis are doing/facing, but because it might provide light on what we might be doing right/wrong or not doing right/wrong.

Would you like to make a prediction for what day/month/year we will see an ingominious exit from Iraq?

Posted by: Tim at October 26, 2004 6:02 PM | Permalink

Shrink Comment: As someone who also spent 8 years teaching 3rd and 4th graders, some of this thread reminds me of "recess" - bullies on the playground!

Yes, too much reality.

Posted by: Mary Ann at October 26, 2004 11:36 PM | Permalink

Thanks, everyone. This has been one of the more interesting threads at PressThink, despite or maybe because of a certain circularity.

Tim: where did you find that Phil Graham quote? Is it online?

sbw: "The separate realities of Bush and Kerry supporters" does have an ambiguity left in it, deliberately so. Whether it's a "fatal" one is a matter of interpretation.

This is PressThink's most read post or close to it. It strikes me as significant that in blogging, the inability to figure something out can lead to a successful post, which does not really happen in journalism. This is because of the different ways each practice has for generating some kind of authority-- generating some kind of spark.

Also, and much to my relief, this post has been more successful than any recent one in drawing women into the thread. Why?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at October 27, 2004 1:49 AM | Permalink

Jay, two sources for the Graham quote:

Bartleby.com Quotations
SPJ Journalism related quotes (first under heading Journalism)

OT: E&P New Study Finds Media Favored Kerry in First Two Weeks of October

Posted by: Tim at October 27, 2004 9:01 AM | Permalink

Why more women?

Speaking only for myself, this post hit topics I've already thought about extensively. If the answers aren't on the tips of my fingers already, I generally don't have time to post. Not that that has anything to do with being female, necessarily.

Posted by: ErikaEM at October 27, 2004 10:44 AM | Permalink

"Also, and much to my relief, this post has been more successful than any recent one in drawing women into the thread. Why?"

Why does it matter ? Why is the sex of the commenters a noteworthy issue ? I don't think it is.

Posted by: Jacob at October 27, 2004 11:32 AM | Permalink

I'm guessing that more women means that he's getting a wider spread of opinions from a demographic that's usually tough to reach online.
Women often have a different perspective on media influence than men (and are affected differently than men by imagery). On the surface, it's nice to say that sex doesn't matter, but if the condition exists that sex/gender has an impact on media views, it's good to cover the bases. It's also nice to know that more women are getting involved online these days.

I'd attribute some of the interest from some of the women (though I can't confirm it) from this post being linked to Instapundit a couple days ago. Being linked to blogs like dailykos, instapundit, atrios, talkingpointsmemo, andrewsullivan, realclearpolitics, LGF, etc. tend to draw instant traffic online.

Posted by: Steve at October 27, 2004 2:00 PM | Permalink

Steve, I'd attribute the up-swing of posts in general to the links from other sites, but I wouldn't necessarily attribute an up-swing in women to it. For example, I know that Talking Points Memo has a predominantly male readership; I believe in the neighborhood of 80%. It's not likely that links to that site would draw more women than men. I don't know about the others. (I assume, Jay, that you mean a greater proportion of the people posting are female. Otherwise, the same proportion + more posts = more women automatically)

One possibility is that normally a fair number of women read, but don't post. If Jay would care to set up a survey and get some site statistics, someone could do a comparison. Certainly there's a belief in media studies that women are encouraged to be passive, and men are encouraged to be active. Conformity to that pattern could account for a (potential) discrepancy between viewing and posting proportions.

I do think the question of why there are more women on this thread (and fewer on normal threads) is an interesting one, Jay. It's relevant for me, certainly. The truth is I don't know why. For people in general, this post covers such a broad array of topics that it's really easy to find something you'd want to comment on. That's not the case with posts on a single topic. Also, at least for me, an appeal of "I don't get it, help me out here" leads me to respond as if it were a conversation, whereas I react to most posts as I would to an essay. I rarely respond to an essay unless I have time and personal motivation to write something similarly well thought out (or there's a glaring error requiring a short correction). Even then, it feels like work. I firmly believe that anything worth doing is worth doing well (and often at length!). I also generally don't like to get involved in back-and-forth commenting unless there's something I can learn from it, or there's a real possibility of someone else learning from it.

I would definitely agree that it's good to get input from people with a variety of backgrounds.

Posted by: ErikaEM at October 27, 2004 4:35 PM | Permalink

Correction: the same proportion + more PEOPLE POSTING = more women automatically

More posts could be due to the same people posting multiple times.

Posted by: ErikaEM at October 27, 2004 4:41 PM | Permalink

[Off-topic] Jeff Jarvis joins blogs taking positions on election issues. So I did, too.

Posted by: sbw at October 27, 2004 5:32 PM | Permalink

I think I do see a big picture in all the points raised in your BBC interview. We're witnessing a schism between the elites in America and the non-elite. This may portend a greater change than even the invention of moveable type.

Ever since the dawn of history, the elites have led, and the rest have followed. Originally, this meant the nobility and the commoners; in later centuries the elite opened their membership to others based on their particular merit. But in all cases, the elite comprised the recognized ruling class politically, intellectually, culturally, and economically. There's a good reason that history usually involves what the elite thought and did - the rest didn't really much matter.

In order to lead without chaos, the elite have had to form a consensus on what is right and proper, and what dissent is allowed within those bounds. Nineteenth century England is perhaps the epitome of that system, where the issues of the day were decided only by wealthy MPs whose main difference from each other was which club they frequented. America's experience is a bit more unruly, as the great unwashed occasionally rise up at the polls, e.g., the Jackson and Reagan presidencies. However, the issues of the day were still framed within the bounds of the elite rules of engagement - what the NY Times and CBS said still had a decisive influence on what was said, and on what terms. There was effectively no way for dissidents to express themselves outside the scope of elite media and institutions. Potential upsetters-of-the-applecart were isolated and ineffective.

With the rise of modern communications technology and its availability to nearly everybody, those constraints have been removed. Where the dissaffected in the past had little choice but to go along, now there is the ability for alternative voices to be heard, to organize, and to become effective. We first saw this in the contribution of the FAX machine to the fall of communism. Cable TV has greatly increased the availability of broadcast possibilities. The Internet is a huge step forward in the democratization of the means of mass communication. In short, the non-elite are no longer helpless.

For these reasons, a schism between the elites and the non-elite was probably inevitable sooner or later. Contributing to its remarkable progress this year has been the fact that the radical liberal (by 1960's standards) "long march" through the institutions has been successfully completed, and the elite consensus has moved very far from the sensibilities of a huge number of the non-elite. With this election, the rebellion is in full swing, politically and culturally.

Where is this likely to lead? Undoubtably in the short run, to precisely the chaos that the elite consensus was designed to avoid. When all voices are free to be heard, what an individual listens to is his own choice. This is great news for proponents of individual freedom, but very bad news for builders of public institutions, both governmental and private. Whether this is good or bad, and whether a more widely shared consensus will arise, is certainly unclear. The only thing that is clear is that America, (and eventually all the developed world,) will never be the same.

Posted by: Harry Moore at October 28, 2004 4:34 AM | Permalink

Harry Moore: The only thing that is clear is that America, (and eventually all the developed world,) will never be the same.

So be it. If people "can't handle the truth", we use the same tool to develop their skills. This may be the way to bring back education.

Posted by: sbw at October 28, 2004 8:08 AM | Permalink

I used to be a reporter at several big newspapers. Once, I was sent out to do a story on the increase in gasoline taxes that took effect that day. I went to a couple of gas stations and interview patrons. No one seemed to mind paying extra, or even notice. I called my editor. He said, "This is going on Page One. Go interview some more people." Which meant, You'd better find someone who cares because the big editorial cheeses have decided that this is what the story should say.

That was the moment that I realized there would be an end of traditional journalism and MSM.
And all it would take was getting the power to publish ideas and facts into the hands of more people and regular people. Once more people could exchange ideas and facts, the editors would lose control of ideas and facts.

That's what's happening in the "religion" of journalism. The priests have lost control of the congregation. Everyone can read their own Bible, interpret it, and then publish their own interpretation of it. It's more than Gutenberg moment--it's actually a Martin Luther moment as well.

Posted by: Dr. Cookie at October 28, 2004 12:22 PM | Permalink

10.28.04

Concerning the list of contemporary issues under discussion, I do believe that there are some common threads: divide and conquer has always been, along with brutal military action, a favorite strategy for hamstringing effective political action and shortcircuiting any possibility of grass-roots democracy. Fragmentation of the population horizontally and vertically into easily monitored and manipulated, mutually suspicious and terrified cells, is a way to control all activities, and forstall any genuine discussion of real issues such as distribution of assets and the kind of government and processes best suited to the people. This fragmentation makes effective action virtually impossible. Increasing incivility, degradation of public discourse and journalism into ad hominum attack and vitriol designed to further fragment and increase the general sense of helplessness can inculcate the false belief in people that there are only two choices: staying with the endless violence and disarray of "democracy" - or accepting the tranquility and faux peace of a totalitarian state where choices are non-existant, and the tumult of free exchange and value of the individual is forgotton.

People can be driven unwittingly by dispair, the spectacle of never-ending warfare and conflict, exhaustion, and hopelessness, into forms of government that represent the worst Orwellian possibilities and very worst side of human nature - a form of government wherein the people exist only as slaves and consumers to support a divinely ordained and secretive elite.

The forces of international capitalism are at play and profit from all sides of conflict. Those who control the economic forces are most terrified of the power individuals working together for the common good have and, now, as the clock is ticking down on the oil resource (30 years and counting) have advanced an all-out battle for world power, which we are now seeing escalate as things appear to spin madly out of control.

Professional journalists should not be mere mouthpieces for the powers that be, and despite media consolidation, propaganda, and censorship, should speak the truth based on faith in the intelligence, potential, and basic goodness of the common man. There are not only two possible human futures - it is still possible to envision a third, fourth, or even a fifth way and to bring that into being.

Any medium that provides a platform for genuine exchange of ideas and coming together has real value - and at the same time, will be the subject of open and covert onslaught.

Posted by: D. Downing at October 28, 2004 2:49 PM | Permalink

"It strikes me as significant that in blogging, the inability to figure something out can lead to a successful post, which does not really happen in journalism. "

It _is_ interesting - and, I think, very much related to the woman-participation thing. Happens because you (Jay) are asking, not telling, and so you get suggestions and answers from equally curious and questioning minds, not just the usual mano-a-mano testosterone-fueled struggles for dominance (since nobody's views are attacked, nobody feels compelled to counterattack). A different mind:gut engagement ratio.

Presuming to speak for my gender, we are put off by the testosterone fests and have little to contribute in that arena.

"...does not really happen in journalism"

Too much of conventionally-practiced journalism is about pretending to be authoritative (the real thing being rare, given deadlines and reporters' amount of knowledge relative to the range of stories they're expected to cover) while zipping the curtain up tight so nobody can see the man behind it. Stringers, parachuting in, hiding the editorial decisionmaking processes, etc...

Posted by: Anna at October 28, 2004 4:34 PM | Permalink

I think you hit it, Anna.

Posted by: ErikaEM at October 28, 2004 6:00 PM | Permalink

I think that the most basic, root divide is the faithfull/religious versus the secular/realists. All other divergences are manifestations of this.

Posted by: Alec at October 28, 2004 8:07 PM | Permalink

"Assaults on the very idea of a neutral observer ... separate realities.... [T]here is no over-arching narrative .... I spend much of the day trying to figure out what the connections are, and how best to phrase them. It's exciting; it's exhausting."

But I would argue there *is* an over-arching narrative. Assaults on the IDEA of neutrality? Separate realities?

What we have here is a seriously pervasive irrationality -- afflicting the president, the press and the people. We are witnessing a Descent into Barbarism (title of my longer reflection at http://urielw.com/reason.htm).

Step 1 is to face the problem, which we're not doing. Democracy without rationality really doesn't make much sense.

It's the stupidity, stupid!

Posted by: Uriel Wittenberg at October 28, 2004 8:48 PM | Permalink

"Assaults on the very idea of a neutral observer ... separate realities..."

what's scary is that, in the rarified realm of the blogosphere, one gets the impression that separate realities are the norm.

Empirically, if people achieved a clearer view of reality through reading/writing blogs, we'd expect to see a convergence of perspectives among bloggers and blog-readers. But my impression is that we don't see this. Is there a way to measure it, that can't be co-opted and gamed?

And thanks Erika. I noticed after posting that you'd made similar observations (re social dynamics of participation in comments) earlier.

Posted by: Anna at October 28, 2004 9:37 PM | Permalink

But the key to blogs is that they continue to talk to each other about the issue...as opposed to force-feeding information down throats like MSM sometimes does. Responsible bloggers admit mistakes...and quite honestly, the nature of news sometimes is that it takes months and years before something is determined...bloggers are like anyone trying to come to a satisfactory view...taking information and coming to a conclusion. Sometimes they filter out opposing information, but blog linking/exchange of info let them debate facts and issues. A dialectic as opposed to straight TV news.

Posted by: Steve at October 29, 2004 9:05 AM | Permalink

"Responsible bloggers admit mistakes.... Sometimes they filter out opposing information, but blog linking/exchange of info let them debate facts and issues."

Steve: This may be too optimistic. I don't know if the China blogging community is a perverse case, but they exhibit a clear tendency to indeed "filter out" -- and delete -- "opposing information"; like, truth. Prominent among them are professionally credentialed Western journalists, including participants in a blog run by the Berkeley Journalism School. See China Bloggers: Truth Above All ... but Community First.

MSM have various motives to distort. Bloggers do too -- petty blogger politics, and the pursuit of inbound links.

Posted by: Uriel Wittenberg at October 29, 2004 10:54 AM | Permalink

Geez, Alec, you are so clueless!

There are only two kinds of people in this world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.

Posted by: Alec's Kind of Person at October 29, 2004 10:08 PM | Permalink

From an earlier post:

"....So, there is nothing new, nor anything alarming about the Media. They are what they are, what they have always been. People never accepted the interpretation of reality in the newspapers as undisputed fact. People built their own picture of the world according to the news they gathered from many sources, and their own judgement and world-view. That is what they are doing now too, only with the internet - many more sources are available.

The problem that is maybe somewhat new is twofold: the polarization of the people into distinct ideological camps, and the concentration of almost all MSM in one of those camps - i.e. lack of diversity in MSM. Posted by: Jacob at October 25, 2004 06:00 PM"

Response:

Jacob makes excellent points, including above. What's changed? As the number of print outlets dwindled, MSM's newsrooms went "establishment" in their own minds and actions. MSM also takes as gospel what it reports/mis-reports. It creates a "reality" and then defends it rather than exploring issues from varied angles.

I find the bloggers' expertise and mindsets refreshing as they poke and prod their way through a controversy or issue. They're also so generous in linking to pro & con arguments elsewhere in the blogosphere or online MSM. And they have spouses & kids, pets, emergencies and hobbies. They're as "real" as their readers.

Kudos to Jay for noticing the increase in women responders. Probably it's the topic...

Posted by: Catherine Ellen at October 30, 2004 8:40 AM | Permalink

From an earlier post:

"....So, there is nothing new, nor anything alarming about the Media. They are what they are, what they have always been. People never accepted the interpretation of reality in the newspapers as undisputed fact. People built their own picture of the world according to the news they gathered from many sources, and their own judgement and world-view. That is what they are doing now too, only with the internet - many more sources are available.

The problem that is maybe somewhat new is twofold: the polarization of the people into distinct ideological camps, and the concentration of almost all MSM in one of those camps - i.e. lack of diversity in MSM. Posted by: Jacob at October 25, 2004 06:00 PM"

Response:
Jacob makes excellent points, including above. What's changed? As the number of print outlets dwindled, MSM's newsrooms went "establishment" in their own minds and actions. MSM also takes as gospel what it reports/mis-reports. It creates a reality and then defends it rather than exploring issues from varied angles.

I find the bloggers' expertise and mindsets refreshing as they poke and prod their way through a controversy or issue. They're also so generous in linking to pro & con arguments elsewhere in the blogosphere or online MSM. And they have spouses & kids, pets, emergencies and hobbies. They're as "real" as their readers.

Kudos to Jay for noticing the increase in women responders. Probably it's the topic...

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Posted by: slots at October 30, 2004 8:26 PM | Permalink

A Scientist's View
As a practicing experimental scientist I'll make two points:

(1) What unifies most of the issues you raise is that when journalists use the word 'objectivity', they are not speaking English.

Grab a dictionary and have a look. Nothing in either of the two dictionaries I have at hand makes any mention of the notions of balance or 'he said she said' that define what journalists mean by objectivity. Instead, dictionaries define objectivity as referring to what most lay-people think it means, and what they wish they were getting when they read the newspaper: The real truth. That which can be observed. That which exists not just outside of the journalist's mind, but also outside of the minds of the Republican operatives and Democratic spinners that he interviewed for the story.

Journalists, then, are using jargon when they use the term objectivity in their own sense. The journalistic jargon kind of objectivity might better just be called 'he said she said' -- at least, as a lay person, there seems to be little more to defining it.

Besides journalists, there are several other professions whose reason for existing is mostly/entirely to find the objective truth: scientists, judges, lawyers, and policeman, for example. Each of these professions has chosen a very different way to get at the truth, each has its own pros and cons, and any journalist (or lawyer, or scientist) can benefit greatly from thinking hard about how other professions seek the truth and how those techniques apply to his own profession.

Let me recommend to the serious journalists the technique used by scientists. To oversimplify, scientists start by pointing out what 'he said' and what 'she said' too. This is the first 1% of their effort. They then go on to work hard to understand the real facts, and with the last 99% of their effort craft an article in which they describe what they find to be the facts, exactly how they were checked, and why the reader should be confident that they have gotten the facts straight, and how the facts relate to what 'he said' and 'she said'.

Always easily applicable? No. Easily applicable when one of the major sources quoted in the article is known to be lying, as for example happened several times during the Presidential Debates? Yes, easily applicable. And very helpful to the journalist's true goals.

(2) Journalism is not nearly as 'scholarly' as it might be -- that is, not nearly as good at including in an article easy ways for the reader to check the facts that the journalist is presenting.

Almost all of the citations are to spoken words that aren't archived. Instead, articles should be full of citations to the source material -- they might be underlined in the print copy and html-linked in the online copy. I mean audio and video clips quoting, in full, things that were said in public, or in taped interviews with the journalist. By this I mean links to previous articles in the same paper or elsewhere that are related to what 'he said'. By this I mean links to detailed economic data that forms the background for so many articles.

Us real readers, we want to see this stuff.

Posted by: jim at October 30, 2004 11:05 PM | Permalink

Jim's elucidation of journalist jargon is, I presume, sarcastic. But in effect he's right -- newspapers often seem oblivious to the notion of objective truth. This is underscored by the reference in Prof. Rosen's original post above to "assaults on the very idea of a neutral observer" and "the separate realities of Bush and Kerry supporters."

But his prescription falls short.

Consider the implications for how to play the game rationally, when journalistic "objectivity" means quoting everyone equally and uncritically. Naturally, the proficient players jettison truth as a losing strategy and promote any nonsense that suits their objectives.

Jim recommends the obvious reform: get the facts and report the truth. Perhaps this approach will come to gain a little more favor. But that would hardly be enough. What has to be recognized is that deceit has proven itself so useful it is PERVASIVE, in business and politics. It's beginning to define our culture.

Hence my view: "a single conceptual leap would greatly strengthen our ability to promote our common goals of justice and security: in a modern society, the citizenry must understand, as it does not today, that large-scale deception is a social offense on par with obvious crimes that directly cause physical harm.... Deception can produce transfers of money whose effects are identical to theft. And it can mislead the nation into war -- especially when a doctrine of preemption has been adopted. (From Mistaken War.)

Posted by: Uriel Wittenberg at October 31, 2004 5:53 PM | Permalink

Well spoken, Uriel Wittenberg. "large-scale deception is a social offense on par with obvious crimes that directly cause physical harm..." - But how are we to bring about this conceptual leap and, even more crucially, how could we possibly give the public the tools with which to parse deception from truth when - in some cases now - only in-field experts can separate the artful deceptions spun by legions of talented PR flacks and dedicated ideologues from truth ?

There are many cultural streams feeding this beast, the intentional architecture of deception, but that one which seems to me to be the blackest stream - and that which most potently animates the conservative zeitgeist now - concerns the fusion of postmodernist and relativistic sensibilities - bastardized into a functional amorality deployed in the service of a recrudescent pre-millenarial Christian Reconstructionist ideology which is quietly and cultishly taking American fundamentalism by storm, and which is busily planning for Dominion, a harsh Dominion built on an elevation of the Old Testament over the New, and which is unmoderated by the Talmud : it may be even a reawakening of that darker spirit - which arises periodically, perhaps as a fever intrinsic to the core and soul of Christendom - that drives Torquemadas to their inquisitions seeking to cleanse the faith with the technologies of Hell, and animates opportunistic zealouts, claiming divine mandate for holy war, to incite the faithful towards crusades by fire and sword.

Posted by: Troutfishing at November 1, 2004 10:03 AM | Permalink

>how are we to bring about this conceptual leap and, even more crucially, how could we possibly give the public the tools ....

Glad you asked, Trout.

It's amazing how backwards, indeed, how barbaric our society is in its approach to the problem of government. Determining how to achieve the common good in this complex world is -- obviously -- an intellectual problem, calling for reason, logic, impartial scholarship, etc. But we don't treat it as such. It's a shouting match where most participants are overt deceivers and where deception is accepted as the nature of the game.

What's equally amazing is how irrelevant most disinterested scholars and academics are, and how they seem content to let the insanity carry on without getting involved themselves.

I contend that if the shouting, heckling, lying and corruption could be muted, and processes of reason permitted to proceed, many issues could be resolved quite straightforwardly.

Many would argue that differences would persist because of natural ideological differences between people. That view is overblown. Our fundamental goals are highly consistent. What's needed is brains.

So -- how to "bring about this conceptual leap"? Well, it's not going to hit everybody at once. But a few thinkers -- bloggers, academics, anyone -- have to start appreciating that:

1. To address our intellectual challenges, it's best to use our intellects.

2. The deceivers -- who are everywhere -- represent the forces of darkness. They should be confronted and discredited, and their toxic influence removed from the public debate. (At the moment that virtually never happens; they are the public debate.)

>how could we possibly give the public the tools with which to parse deception from truth when - in some cases now - only in-field experts can separate the artful deceptions spun by legions of talented PR flacks and dedicated ideologues from truth ?

If you have:

- an exchange of sufficient duration between a liar and a capable truth-teller (that is, a truth-teller who expresses himself clearly and simply);

AND (this is crucial):

- the exchange is in written form (to eliminate caveman-era, non-intellectual distractions),

then, I would contend, it's very hard indeed for the liar to remain credible.

Truth has a huge natural advantage in any forum that respects rational processes. The tragedy is that we have so few forums of that description.

Posted by: Uriel Wittenberg at November 1, 2004 5:16 PM | Permalink

Uriel - Are you talking from your heart and fighting with your head ? Both are necessary, I'd say - and I imagine you'd agree.

Logic - in and of itself - does not offer, for most, sufficient meaning. Perhaps you are one of those rare few for whom it does.

I agree that logic and lucid argument can drive back lies, but what great historical force could animate the passion behind that ? - Either a new Enlightenment, or the force of religion.

If Religion, then Christianity and - if Christianity - then disparate and dessicated elements of progressive Christianity require a reawakening, to reanimation by a new sort of energy.

Please believe me - I have no specific agenda. I'm simply calling tthe shots as I see them.

The Religious Right in America - the source of much of the deception we are discussing - also has vitality and offers a sort of hope and community, for it's adherents, which is lacking in mainstream society.

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Below - the problem of the religious right in the US ( which underlays my last comment)

The Problem :

Systematic assessments of the influence on the Christian Religious Right in the UAS
Congress and in Federal government overall reveal :

Astonishing gains since the early 90's - when the Religious Right first took
over the Republican Party of Texas.

Here is one entry point - a post I made on this at Metafilter.com : or, go directly
to 1) Theocracy
Watch :

"The graphs and tables below tell a story. They portray a Congress that is highly polarized, and they dispel two important myths

Myth 1) There isn't much difference between the two political parties.

Myth 2) The Religious Right has grown into obscurity.

According to ratings of key organizations of the Religious Right, members of
Congress who support their agenda overwhelmingly dominate the Republican Party."
(from Theocracy Watch)

2) The Yurica Report especially Conquering by Stealth and Deception - Kathleen Yurica has been covering the
Religious Right in American steadily since, at least, the mid-1980's - when she
was commissioned by Congress to write a report on possible violations of tax
exempt status by Pat Robertson's 700 Club.

I've been covering the religious right recently, at length, Blog on the Religious Right, etc.
and on DailKos

Posted by: Troutfishing at November 1, 2004 11:29 PM | Permalink

Logic - in and of itself - does not offer, for most, sufficient meaning.... I agree that logic and lucid argument can drive back lies, but what great historical force could animate the passion behind that ?

Kids deprived of education by violent schools; families destroyed by drugs and imprisonment; inadequate health coverage; the continuing danger of domestic terrorism. That's where you can get the passion.

Logic and rationality are the means to our common ends.

Maybe the forces of irrationality will sweep America. Democracy is an experiment that always had its doubters. The hope is that Americans' common sense will prevail.

I read some of the "Conquering by Stealth and Deception" article you cite.

It discusses

the Free Congress Foundation's strategic plan on how to gain control of the government of the U.S. Written by Eric Heubeck, and titled, "The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement," the document is no longer available at the Free Congress Foundation's website for obvious reasons. But excerpts are published at the Yurica Report. The excerpts explain why the Dominionists are winning; the tactics they endorse are sheer Machiavellian....

One excerpt is:

This essay is based on the belief that the truth of an idea is not the primary reason for its acceptance. Far more important is the energy and dedication of the idea's promoters--in other words, the individuals composing a social or political movement…

Some paraphrasings are offered, with the following apparently corresponding to the excerpt above:

Falsehoods are not only acceptable, they are a necessity. The corollary is: The masses will accept any lie if it is spoken with vigor, energy and dedication.

I don't accept the paraphrasing. I don't see any talk of conscious lies. The authors presumably believe in the rightness of their cause.

The "strategic plan" also says: "We must be feared, so that [the Left] will think twice before opening their mouths…."

Again, there's nothing necessarily illegitimate there. It could reflect the same frustration I myself feel with the success deceivers achieve in public debate.

The document also refers to "the sickness and decay of today's American culture."

That's undeniable, isn't it? I feel strongly about that myself and have written and lectured about it. See for example American Culture -- A Warning for China.

Posted by: Uriel Wittenberg at November 2, 2004 10:32 AM | Permalink

Q: What connects those items?
A: America is coming apart at the seams. Those who have a lot are grabbing for more. Those who do not have enough are grasping for some. Those in the middle are trying to figure out what the hell to do. People from all groups are scared. The end result is chaos.

Hmmm...that's not quite the connection, is it? I'll have to work on this a bit.

Posted by: Romdinstler Jones at November 4, 2004 10:17 PM | Permalink