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January 12, 2009
Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the PressIn the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized-- connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why.It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.” That’s the entire model. Now you have a way to understand why it’s so unproductive to argue with journalists about the deep politics of their work. They don’t know about this freakin’ diagram! Here it is in its original form, from the 1986 book The Uncensored War by press scholar Daniel C. Hallin. Hallin felt he needed something more supple—and truthful—than calcified notions like objectivity and “opinions are confined to the editorial page.” So he came up with this diagram. Let’s look more carefully at his three regions. 1.) The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.) Hallin: “This is the region of electoral contests and legislative debates, of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process.” Here the two-party system reigns, and the news agenda is what the people in power are likely to have on their agenda. Perhaps the purest expression of this sphere is Washington Week on PBS, where journalists discuss what the two-party system defines as “the issues.” Objectivity and balance are “the supreme journalistic virtues” for the panelists on Washington Week because when there is legitimate debate it’s hard to know where the truth lies. There are risks in saying that truth lies with one faction in the debate, as against another— even when it does. He said, she said journalism is like the bad seed of this sphere, but also a logical outcome of it. 2. ) The sphere of consensus is the “motherhood and apple pie” of politics, the things on which everyone is thought to agree. Propositions that are seen as uncontroversial to the point of boring, true to the point of self-evident, or so widely-held that they’re almost universal lie within this sphere. Here, Hallin writes, “journalists do not feel compelled either to present opposing views or to remain disinterested observers.” (Which means that anyone whose basic views lie outside the sphere of consensus will experience the press not just as biased but savagely so.) Consensus in American politics begins, of course, with the United States Constitution, but it includes other propositions too, like “Lincoln was a great president,” and “it doesn’t matter where you come from, you can succeed in America.” Whereas journalists equate ideology with the clash of programs and parties in the debate sphere, academics know that the consensus or background sphere is almost pure ideology: the American creed. 3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.” Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.  Complications to keep in mind. The three spheres are not really separate; they create one another, like the public and private do. The boundaries between regions are semi-porous and impermanent. Things can move out of one sphere and into another—that’s what political and cultural change is, if you think about it—but when they do shift there is often no announcement. One day David Brody of Christian Broadcasting Network shows up on Meet the Press, but Amy Goodman of Democracy Now never does. This can be confusing. Of course, the producers of Meet the Press could say in a press release, “We decided that Pat Robertson’s CBN is now to be placed within the sphere of legitimate debate because… ” but then they would have to complete the “because” in a plausible way and very often they cannot. (“Amy Goodman, we decided, does not qualify for this show because…”) This gap between what journalists actually do as they arrange the scene of politics, and the portion they can explain or defend publicly—the difference between making news and making sense—is responsible for a lot of the anger and bad feeling projected at the political press by various constituencies that notice these moves and question them. Within the sphere of legitimate debate there is some variance. Journalists behave differently if the issue is closer to the doughnut hole than they do when it is nearer the edge. The closer they think they are to the unquestioned core of consensus, the more plausible it is to present a single view as the only view, which is a variant on the old saw about American foreign policy: “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” (Atrios: “I’ve long noticed a tendency of the American press to take the side of official US policy when covering foreign affairs.”) Another complication: Journalists aren’t the only actors here. Elections have a great deal to do with what gets entered into legitimate debate. Candidates—especially candidates for president—can legitimize an issue just by talking about it. Political parties can expand their agenda, and journalists will cover that. Powerful and visible people can start questioning a consensus belief and remove it from the “everyone agrees” category. And of course public opinion and social behavior do change over time. Some implications of Daniel Hallin’s model. That journalists affirm and enforce the sphere of consensus, consign ideas and actors to the sphere of deviance, and decide when the shift is made from one to another— none of this is in their official job description. You won’t find it taught in J-school, either. It’s an intrinsic part of what they do, but not a natural part of how they think or talk about their job. Which means they often do it badly. Their “sphere placement” decisions can be arbitrary, automatic, inflected with fear, or excessively narrow-minded. Worse than that, these decisions are often invisible to the people making them, and so we cannot argue with those people. It’s like trying to complain to your kid’s teacher about the values the child is learning in school when the teacher insists that the school does not teach values. When (with some exceptions) political journalists failed properly to examine George W. Bush’s case for war in Iraq, they were making a category mistake. They treated Bush’s plan as part of the sphere of consensus. But even when Congress supports it, a case for war can never be removed from legitimate debate. That’s just a bad idea. Mentally placing the war’s opponents in the sphere of deviance was another category error. In politics, when people screw up like that, we can replace them: throw the bums out! we say. But the First Amendment says we cannot do that to people in the press. The bums stay. And later they are free to say: we didn’t screw up at all, as David Gregory, now host of Meet the Press, did say to his enduring shame. “We are not allowing ourselves to think politically.” Deciding what does and does not legitimately belong within the national debate is—no way around it—a political act. And yet a pervasive belief within the press is that journalists do not engage in such action, for to do so would be against their principles. As Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post once said about why things make the front page, “We think it’s important informationally. We are not allowing ourselves to think politically.” I think he’s right. The press does not permit itself to think politically. But it does engage in political acts. Ergo, it is an unthinking actor, which is not good. When it is criticized for this it will reject the criticism out of hand, which is also not good. Atrios, the economist and liberal blogger with a big following, has a more colorful phrase for “maintaining boundaries around the sphere of legitimate debate.” He often writes about the “dirty f*cking hippies,” by which he means the out-of-power or online left, and the way this group is marginalized by Washington journalists, who sometimes seem to define themselves against it. “In the late 90s, the dirty f*cking hippies were the crazy people who thought that Bill Clinton should neither resign nor be impeached,” he writes. “In the great wasteland of our mainstream media there was almost no place one could turn to find someone expressing the majority view of the American public, that this whole thing was insane.” Sometimes the people the press thinks of as deviant types are closer to the sphere of consensus than the journalists who are classifying those same people as “fringe.” How can that happen? Well, one of the problems with our political press is that its reference group for establishing the “ground” of consensus is the insiders: the professional political class in Washington. It then offers that consensus to the country as if it were the country’s own, when it’s not, necessarily. This erodes confidence in a way that may be invisible to journalists behaving as insiders themselves. And it gives the opening to Jon Stewart and his kind to exploit that gap I talked about between making news and making sense. “Echo chamber” or counter-sphere? Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition. In the past there was nowhere for this kind of sentiment to go. Now it collects, solidifies and expresses itself online. Bloggers tap into it to gain a following and serve demand. Journalists call this the “echo chamber,” which is their way of downgrading it as a reliable source. But what’s really happening is that the authority of the press to assume consensus, define deviance and set the terms for legitimate debate is weaker when people can connect horizontally around and about the news. Which is how I got to my three word formlua for understanding the Internet’s effects in politics and media: “audience atomization overcome.” After Matter: Notes, reactions & links… Daniel C. Hallin writes in with a response. I urge you to read it. He says there has been a “de-centering” of the mass media since the Vietnam War era. He also thinks the echo chamber is a plausible outcome of that process: Many of those who posted seem to believe that what is on the internet is closer to “real public opinion” than what is in the mainstream media, but I’m not sure we really know this. Some of the posts seem based on the assumption that “the people” are always wise, but I would question this, and also point to Alexis deToqueville’s old observation that the greatest barrier to real freedom of thought in America is often not top-down control but public opinion itself. More Hallin: “I think journalists often play an important role as an independent source of information, and in many ways I’d like to see them playing a stronger role, not a weaker one, in shaping the public sphere.” Me too! My reply: I think a strong, independent press can be undermined by thoughtless press bashing, phony populism and culture war excess. Definitely. I also think a strong independent press is undermined when the professionals in it fail to recognize that there’s a politics to what they do, which can go wrong, fall out of alignment, or even implode, failing the country. David Westphal, former head of McClatchy Newspapers Washington bureau and now a journalism professor at USC, cheers Hallin on in the comments. “The role of the independent press needs to be strengthened, not brought down in victory-lap celebration.” Glenn Greenwald did a Salon Radio podcast with me about this piece and the arguments behind it. Here’s his post introducing it. (About a 25-minute listen. There’s also a transcript.) Sample: The ability to infect us with notions of what’s realistic is one of the most potent powers press and political elites have. Whenever we make that kind of decision — “well it’s pragmatic, let’s be realistic” — what we’re really doing is we’re speculating about other Americans, our fellow citizens, and what they’re likely to accept or what works on them or what stimuli they respond to. And that way of seeing other Americans, fellow citizens, is in fact something the media has taught us; that is one of the deepest lessons we’ve learned from the media even if we are skeptics. Always remember what Raymond Williams said, “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” During the age of mass media, these ways of seeing sunk deeply into us. It’s harder to get them out than you think. I speak to that in the podcast with Glenn. So far no comment, reaction, link or other gesture from journalists in the national press. This after I told Chris Cillizza, who does The Fix blog for the Washington Post, “I wrote this for you, especially you. When you have a moment, give it a gander.” (That was on Twitter.) Of course we are exchanging presidents in DC this week so maybe they have other things to do :-) You can follow me on Twitter, if you’re on Twitter. It’s like PressThink for the live web. “This just in—from 1986.” Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler didn’t think much of my post. Old news, overly jargonized, not very illuminating, he says. In the comments: the return of lefty blogging legend Billmon, who is posting at Daily Kos again… The established media—particularly the Washington-based political media—are not passive agents here. They have an overt bias for consensus and against “deviancy”, which means they want the doughnut hole to be as big as possible and they want to exclude as much “deviancy” as possible from admission to the sphere of “legitimate” debate. Who is Billmon? I met him once. Cool guy. Investigative reporter John McQuaid says at his blog that “it’s good to have a million voices calling BS on big media’s persistent, strange, Reagan-era take on American politics.” Obviously, you can’t turn back the clock. You can’t leverage authority that no longer exists. A new configuration of old/new media is still taking shape. So: will a vastly more diverse but also more diffuse media ecosystem still have the ability (via individual media outlet, or via a swarm) to bring pressure to bear on the upper levels of government? Atrios—who has a speaking part in this post—reacts at Eschaton. “I think the most fascinating thing is how willfully blind many journalists are about this stuff. I don’t know if they really can’t see it, or if it’s in their interest to pretend not to see it.” Longtime PressThink reader Tim Schmoyer collected some good pointers to writers and scholars who define the news media as a political institution, as I do. Many of the problems discussed in this piece and the podcast with Glenn Greenwald originate in the professional journalist’s felt need to deny this basic observation. That’s why it’s an important observation. The controls have been loosened, says Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake: I’m heartened by Bob Fertik’s efforts and the transparency of the Obama administration that allowed 70,000 people to show up and demand a Special Prosecutor on the change.gov site. It’s the kind of “critical mass” event that defies the ability of a few people to limit the sphere of debate as easily as they have in the past, and shifts the power of defining “consensus” even if slightly in favor people willing to connect and speak up. “Warning: This post has nothing to do with beer.” Brookston Beer Bulletin out of San Francisco picks up on this post; tells suds-seeking readers he’s going off topic. The presentation is cleaner than my own. “I think you nailed it in your explanation of the spheres,” says Daniel Weintraub, political reporter and columnist for the Sacramento Bee. “But when you use the Iraq war run-up as an example where the press supposedly defined opposition as outside the sphere of legitimate debate, you contribute to what I think is a flawed conventional wisdom.” Read the rest. The discussion of this post at Metafilter is amusing, at times enlightening and at times a lot of jeering. Over at Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas—Kos—says that “another word for the ‘sphere of consensus’ is ‘conventional wisdom,’ which plays an important role in my last book, Taking on the System. The person who controls the CW controls the terms of the debate. Modern activism is in large part a battle to capture that CW.” Some people think the right model for that battle is The Overton Window. Typically, they mention it. In The Refs (Jan. 24) Digby says the problem with political journalists is “their own lack of self-awareness and inability to either see or fight the pressures to conform.” An example of a view confined to the sphere of deviance that might have helped the press over the last seven years is my own opinion (shared with a few) that President George W. Bush was a radical, not a conservative or traditional Republican. The press never took it seriously; in my view, that was a bad decision— if we can call it that. The analysis in the last three paragraphs of this post tracks with what Peter Daou wrote in The Revolution of the Online Commentariat: Daou worked in Hillary Clinton’s Internet operation during the 2008 campaign. Ideas and opinions flow from the ground up, insights and inferences, speculation and extrapolation are put forth, then looped and re-looped on a previously unimaginable scale, conventional wisdom created in hours and minutes. This wasn’t the case during the last presidential election — the venues and the voices populating them hadn’t reached critical mass. They have now. Other reactions of note:
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Posted by Jay Rosen at January 12, 2009 12:02 AM
Comments
This looks like a circular variant of the linear Overton Window, doesn't it? Posted by: Coturnix at January 12, 2009 12:42 AM | Permalink Yeah, somewhat. Here's the Wikipedia entry on the Overton Window. What I like about Hallin's diagram is that there is silence in the center, and silence at the edges. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 12, 2009 1:03 AM | Permalink Hi Jay, Actually, it's true that this isn't taught in the Jschools, but i did have a class talk about these issues (actually two) at UC Berkeley's iSchool (information), taught by Warren Sack. We were building systems that worked with "news" types of information, and this was an important aspect when trying to code for information from the press, other sources (there weren't many bloggers then.. around 100k) and users who might do things to the information in these systems. So.. it's possible. But in all the classes I took at UCB's JSchool from 2000-2005, no one touched on anything like this there. And the implicitness of it was scary because it was so controlling without acknowledging even the act of control, much less how and where the controls were applied. mary Posted by: mary hodder at January 12, 2009 2:34 AM | Permalink The use of the web for like-minded people to find each other is a continuation of local (political) clubs/associations, editorial letters to party papers, radio call-in shows, etc. (See Rush Limbaugh is a Deweyan Democrat). Four years ago, I took a shot at explaining how 5 "mainstream" foreign policy political ideologies were moved in & out of the two-sided narrative drama in the time period between 9/11 and Iraq. The debate consensus is often restricted by the structural biases of journalism and the media. Jay, thanks very much for drawing my attention to this piece via Twitter. There’s an incredible resonance for me. My thoughts are still evolving — I’m sure I’ll write more when it’s not late Monday night here in Sydney. But I can see that the “sphere placement” decisions apply to so many aspects of journalism. Bernard Keane, Canberra correspondent for Crikey where I sometimes write, put it brilliantly in his summary of Australian politics for 2008: Politics is more or less based around people of high principles and good will discovering that the obtaining and exercising of power involves doing bad things, distasteful things, amoral things, involves unpleasant trade-offs and not just the famous half-loaves of compromise but stale, mouldy crusts. And it’s all the more that way because its symbiotic partner, its Siamese twin the media, dislikes complexity and nuance, in favour of the same simple narratives, repeated with an ever-changing cast of characters but the same plots and moral lessons over and over again. That’s what sells. And what gets votes. I was also struck by your tweet: Jon Stewart exploits for laughs what I called “the difference between making news and making sense.’ Exactly. The comedians and satirists are free to test the boundaries. “Proper” journalists have to stick to the rituals, playing safe to preserve their jobs in the disintegrating industrial-age media factories. Their proprietors imagine that anything other than the tried-and-tried formulas won’t be appreciated by their audiences. But precisely the opposite happens: audiences desert them because they’re bored with formula reporting whose narratives fit less and less well with their own views of their lives and their world. That’s why I’m increasingly looking at satire in my own writing. Your thoughts have clarified that decision for me. Posted by: Stilgherrian at January 12, 2009 7:43 AM | Permalink So I've got questions about how one source, or topic, or organization moves from outside the circle to the sphere of legitimate debate. For example, was Arianna Huffington outside the circle when she ran in the California recall election? It seemed like it at the time, but between then and now, the Huffington Post has become solidly seated in the sphere of legitimate debate. Was she always just hanging out at the edges of the sphere, with connections and cash and political capital to spend? Maybe. But I wonder if there was a precise moment, or statement, that pushed her and (as cause or effect) the news organization around her, across the membrane. Take that example and then look back at Amy Goodman and try to discern the differences: Would a different method or presentation of information push Goodman across, or is it perhaps *necessary* to have outliers like Goodman operating just outside the sphere of debate, hoping to pull the edges from the outside rather than jumping in and trying to push the circle wider? Posted by: Ryan Sholin at January 12, 2009 8:25 AM | Permalink Well, seeing as the press is controlled by the Government, what difference does it make? I mean really! JT Posted by: James Jones at January 12, 2009 8:53 AM | Permalink MEDIA WATCHERS. Posted by: DON FLYNN at January 12, 2009 10:10 AM | Permalink Jay, couldn't agree with your observations about "blogging and the Net" more, but you take too long to say something incredibly simple and long-ago outlined, and you don't comment on whether it engenders a more or less reliable flow of information. I could really care less about *how* the information flows, I only care that it's reliable, carefully sourced, based on aggregating evidence, redacted as events and further scrutiny bear out, etc. Until the blogosphere -- the whole enchilada, not just the select few diligent -- is capable of engaging in elemental best practices, which transcend labels like "journalism," the disparaging reference by the so-called "legitimate" press to the "I just launched a blog, look at me!" crowd is less off the mark than you imply here. Posted by: Matt at January 12, 2009 10:34 AM | Permalink Posts like this are wonderful, because they crystallize something complex into a form that is not only digestible, but allows one to see parallels in other fields. What struck me immediately was how applicable the 3 spheres is - not only to journalism - but also to marketing and PR. It points out clearly the loss of control traditional agencies feel in a Social Media world. When the power of the platform (or, as I refer to it, the megaphone) is equally accessible by all the ability to control the message evaporates. The challenge - for both journalists and marketing/PR - is how to leverage the audience (and their voices), not silence them. Posted by: Brian Roy at January 12, 2009 11:11 AM | Permalink Reply: Is it really hidden? I'm still interested in the prognosis. Does "audience atomization overcome" lead to more accurate, reliable information predominating? Posted by: Matt at January 12, 2009 12:22 PM | Permalink This post has all the makings of a classic: It explains clearly something that has been confusing people for years; It comes at a moment when crisis has opened some people's minds to the possibility that something is wrong with their fundamental beliefs; and it was written by an outsider who has earned the title of America's top press critic. In short, this post could be a milestone, and a significant step toward moving years of PressThink discussion from the Sphere of Deviance into the Sphere of Legitimate Debate. Excellent. Posted by: Mark Matassa at January 12, 2009 1:50 PM | Permalink On "hippies": I came across an interesting essay recently on Irving Kristol's formulation on the "New Class." There's probably a few figures missing in the discussion--for instance, Lionel Trilling. A few, perhaps related quotes: Paul Krugman on Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: Here's what [Nixonland] doesn't say, which isn't a criticism. What happened, very crucially, was that Nixonism got institutionalized. The creation of a set of institutions - think-tanks, media organizations, all of it funded by a relatively small number of sources (it really comes down to about six angry billionaires, when all is said and done), creating a structure which perpetuates the political style and political goals that were created during these years. Rick has written a lot about the American Enterprise Institute, but not here - AEI was transformed into what we know today towards the end of the period that Rick covers here. The Heritage Foundation is founded in the last two years covered in this book. Those things create an institutional basis for maintaining this style of politics, and then what happens thereafter, is that although the objective reality of urban riots and hippies and anti-war protesters is gone, they are able to find, to conjure up the appearance of equivalents thereafter. No doubt, my claim is colored by the current politics of the last eight years, but that is what you see today. Jim Sleeper on a Jim Tanenhaus talk a few months back at the AEI: In Tanenhaus’ telling, Kristol showed conservative business and political leaders that New Deal managerialism had bred a liberal “new class” of academic, think-tank, and media experts who trafficked in words more than in deeds or missions accomplished. He counseled conservatives to outdo liberals at this game in order to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy for the kind of capitalism and politics conservatives can profit from and enjoy... OK, one more. John Maynard Keynes: The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 12, 2009 2:11 PM | Permalink Cool metric. It would be interesting to graphically place people regularly in the news within this metric, based on the tone of the coverage they receive. I imagine this would be a very measurable way in which the politics of the press could be viewed. For example, where does Al Gore position? I imagine right on the egde of the donut hole - somewhere between "apple pie" and "well, maybe a couple of his facts are a bit loose but it doesn't detract from his point." I haven't read much in the press that questions his assertions or labels him as deviant in any way. Posted by: Brett Rogers at January 12, 2009 2:33 PM | Permalink Don't miss Tanenhaus's talk itself (in the upper right hand corner of this page) which makes important mentions of James Burnham and Irving Kristol: http://www.aei.org/events/eventID.1550/event_detail.asp Posted by: JJWFromME at January 12, 2009 2:36 PM | Permalink It sounds like you're saying that the echo chamber effect is good for debate. What I notice is that with each new idea that's opened for debate, a new sphere is drawn with the spheres inside it. Are you suggesting that it's good for the overall debate that as new voices emerge, they simply create their own version of these spheres? I see how it's weakening the press' influence, but is it necessarily good for the overall debate and discussion of issues and ideas? Posted by: Ryan Jerz at January 12, 2009 2:49 PM | Permalink When you cut to the chase, the implication is that much of the press core is either to dumb to spot their own biases or too dishonest to admit their biases. Actually, that sounds about right. Has anyone seen mainstream media doing any self-chastisement articles about the rather blatant bias during the election? No. At best there are one or two quiet murmurs about "perceived media bias". Ipso facto. Posted by: Mike S. Journalists "draw a circle" and label it a sphere. How fitting somehow. Posted by: Antagon at January 12, 2009 2:56 PM | Permalink Daniel C. Hallin is not a journalist and has never been one. He's a social scientist and college professor. And he didn't draw a circle and label it a sphere. He drew a circle and said "let this stand for a sphere," but not a sphere like a globe is a sphere. His usage is akin to the "public sphere," which is an abstraction but one I think we can handle. It sounds like you're saying that the echo chamber effect is good for debate. Ryan: In this post I am not making a judgment on that particular question: whether the developments I describe here are good or bad for public debate overall. I am trying to point to what has happened, what is different. My main feeling about the "echo chamber" criticism is: too formulaic for my purposes, though I do not dispute that such things--people forming themselves into self-reinforcing cadres--do happen more easily in some ways today. I believe the concept lends itself to wave of the hand dismissals, but that does not mean it's entirely wrong: just inadequate. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 12, 2009 3:02 PM | Permalink Great line a while ago from Thomas Frank: "institutions of higher carping." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122705706314639537.html?mod=googlenews_wsj Posted by: JJWFromME at January 12, 2009 3:06 PM | Permalink In other words: Grassroots Strikes Back! I've often said the things journalists refuse to talk about are much more important than anything they do talk about. Posted by: Number 6 at January 12, 2009 3:17 PM | Permalink What "authority"? From what does this authority derive? What checks are there on this authority, and what are the consequences when it is abused? Posted by: malclave at January 12, 2009 3:23 PM | Permalink The authority derives from owning a piece of technology invented by Gutenberg. Things change, technology changes, see Eric Alterman's piece in the New Yorker from a while ago. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 12, 2009 3:36 PM | Permalink @ryan sholin : one reason, I guess, why Ariana Huffington «crossed the membrane» is that, since her blog was a success, placing her in the «deviance sphere» was not longer feasible. Since she proved she had a wide public, she proved she was in the sphere of reasonable debate. Posted by: Alexandre Cayla at January 12, 2009 4:59 PM | Permalink Great piece, Jay, with one exception. I think you nailed it in your explanation of the spheres. But when you use the Iraq war run-up as an example where the press supposedly defined opposition as outside the sphere of legitimate debate, you contribute to what I think is a flawed conventional wisdom. Go back and read the coverage in the winter and spring of 2002 and 2003. In both news stories and opinion pages, there was a ton of dissent. There was a vigorous debate in Congress, and massive protests in the streets. People who opposed the idea of war in Iraq were neither ostracized, ignored or treated as the fringe. At the time of the invasion a large majority of Democrats in the country opposed it. Since then, a myth has grown that the press, supposedly out of fear that they would be considered unpatriotic, squelched the debate. Not so. You need a better example. Posted by: Daniel Weintraub at January 12, 2009 5:33 PM | Permalink "My main feeling about the 'echo chamber' criticism is: too formulaic for my purposes..." There's some irony in tagging the net as an echo chamber. Mary Mapes was considered "brilliant" by her peers...and Dan Rather wants to be the first to break the story [if] the memo is a fraud... If these people weren't in such isolation they might have damaged their credibility so much. Of course, I no longer trust sources like CNN, NYTs, etc to be my information brokers. I'm somewhat amused that the enlightened sophisticates still do. Its too late for me - asking me to give the MSM another chance is like asking someone to reinvest in Enron. Posted by: Fen at January 12, 2009 5:40 PM | Permalink Entirely too self-referential and so misses the reality on the ground. It is not all about journalists. It is about citizens and other consumers of information. Journalists have been one provider of information that citizens have been willing to support with resources like subscription checks. No longer. Journalism has failed to serve the needs of citizens, becoming far too ideology-driven, just when alternative channels have opened. Frankly, I no longer spend much on traditional journalism (no newspaper, no TV, few magazines) since the internet serves almost all my needs. Most importantly, I am no longer restricted by geographical monopolies or the dominant marketshare players who could afford large numbers of employees. Plus, I increasingly see journalists as ignorant and not very bright. Plus they have a bad attitude. Add that to their general lack of utility, and I say "good riddance." Posted by: Whitehall at January 12, 2009 5:40 PM | Permalink "My main feeling about the 'echo chamber' criticism is: too formulaic for my purposes..." There's some irony in tagging the net as an echo chamber. Mary Mapes was considered "brilliant" by her peers...and Dan Rather wants to be the first to break the story [if] the memo is a fraud... If these people weren't in such isolation they might not have damaged their credibility so much. Of course, I no longer trust sources like CNN, NYTs, etc to be my information brokers. I'm somewhat amused that the enlightened sophisticates still do. Its too late for me - asking me to give the MSM another chance is like asking someone to reinvest in Enron. Posted by: Fen at January 12, 2009 5:40 PM | Permalink An interesting account by a member of the "press!" However, there's another view current amongst us mere lay people, we who buy the daily rags and read them. When reporters revert to writing factual articles minus the reporter's individual opinion, or his editor's ideology, then perhaps more interest in press accounts would happen. However, the internet is here to stay if only because it's a darned good way to exchange information and to browse differing points of view. Whether outlets like the NYT, LAT, NBC, CNN, FNC, or MSNBC, understand that its readership has options is a separate issue and one that might hold the balance on which mass media's future will depend. Posted by: DougW at January 12, 2009 5:40 PM | Permalink Lest this go unstated: "Sphere of Deviance" would be a great name for a blog. Or, as Dave Barry would say, for a rock band. Posted by: Jay Manifold at January 12, 2009 5:42 PM | Permalink Matt: you seem to imply that the legacy press is "reliable, carefully sourced, based on aggregating evidence, redacted as events and further scrutiny bear out, etc." Which parallel universe did I miss? Posted by: DoctorOfLove at January 12, 2009 6:24 PM | Permalink I think the best, most recent example of journalists defining opposition as outside the legitimate sphere of debate was the media's love affair with Barack Obama. Fortunately, as declining circulation and revenues illustrate, the general public is starting to define journalism as being outside the legitimate sphere of information sources. The opinions provided by a random blogger may or may not be accurate; but I know for a fact that the New York Times is a pathological liar. So I'll take the random blogger instead. Posted by: Evil Pundit at January 12, 2009 6:31 PM | Permalink "Journalism" professionals STILL can not Identify their competition. If you have an automotive engineer who writes an insightful three page description of an engine his team is developing every three years, that used to not be a problem. Even though it was just as well written as someone with a journalism or English degree might write. It was one article every three years that only the man's friends were likely to see. If they shared it, well a few xerox copies mailed around still don't reach that many people even if it pyramids out seven times and by the time the last group gets it it will be a month later if they were being mailed. Fast foreword to now. There are thousands of engineers. Every 1095 of them writing once every three years equal one story a day. Written, generally, for free. As in costs no money. As in they are writing for their own vanity. And on the web, writing in interest forums, or having those forums available as a place their friends might send the article - it will be seen. Extend this out to other interests, because it carries over across the board. Journalists keep looking at the picture trying to figure out how content producers are going to be paid in the new media. The stopper is that they have to compete with people who write about any given subject as well or better than they possibly can WHO DON'T EXPECT TO BE PAID. When the internet arrived and provided a means for people to disseminate their writings, this became inevitable. I saw it, Drudge saw it, hundreds and hundreds of people saw and have been discussing it for over a decade. The dinosaur media is late to the party. Long meandering monologues are good for showboating your vocabulary, but they fail to change reality. Posted by: Phogg at January 12, 2009 6:46 PM | Permalink The best illustration of this today is in Gaza, where the press decides what is or isn't truth for Americans. Palestinians on Facebook are using an application that puts daily casualty reports in their status updates, so in their own way, these people are connecting horizontally and getting the word out, which is exactly Jay's point. Posted by: Terry Heaton at January 12, 2009 6:50 PM | Permalink Matt, You write: "Does "audience atomization overcome" lead to more accurate, reliable information predominating?" Most likely it will. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is much disparaged in some circles, but it will work with news and information just as surely as it does with cars and apples: Suppliers of good-quality products prosper, while purveyors of junk go to the wall. Always have, always will. Just look at how the New York Times is going down the tubes, thanks to its proclivity for publishing lies and its general dishonesty.
Posted by: Hale Adams at January 12, 2009 8:00 PM | Permalink Journalism is dead. The Obama media is no different than Germany in the 30s: "Propaganda made the Third Reich" -Goebbels ....and today it made Barry Soetoro. Posted by: exDemocrat at January 12, 2009 8:22 PM | Permalink It's not just the MSM that has a "sphere of deviance". For instance, the fact that Obama has never provided definitive proof of where he was born is considered to be in that sphere by both the MSM and most bloggers: http://24ahead.com/s/obama-citizenship Take a look. FactCheck et al are lying about that issue, claiming that the state of HI said something that is not in their public statement about this issue. In fact, anyone who says that the state of HI verified where Obama was born after having read the statement from the state of HI is seeing things. Despite that, I have been able to find absolutely zero traction for that story. Both the MSM and major bloggers have been incredibly success at misleading about the issue. Posted by: NoMoreBlatherDotCom In my last comment I wrote about the old-media proprietors afraid to do anything other than the “the tried-and-tried formulas”. A typo, but perhaps better than “tried and true”. The old formulas are no longer true. Posted by: Stilgherrian at January 12, 2009 9:14 PM | Permalink This, straight from AlterNet's "About" page: Amplifier for Other Progressive Media AlterNet is a key player in the echo chamber of progressive ideas and vision. We create original reportage while amplifying the best content from over 200 independent media sources and individual voices, including over 40 of the most compelling and insightful blogs. In the past year, AlterNet has brought more than 11 million readers and viewers to other progressive media makers' content -- often many more readers and viewers than the content received originally. Also, Jay, I've long argued that the guests on the Sunday morning talk shows are there to please advertisers more so than audiences. Think about it ...who the hell watches TV on Sunday morning? Not the target demo of most TV advertisers. And I can't see the board of ADM interested in Amy Goodman. Any thoughts? May the world be punished with the poor quality of journalism that exists in the US. Seriously, the sphere of deviance in the US media, notwithstanding the recent election, is quite small. There is conventional wisdom, but you only have to turn to page 3 or look for something else on the news stand to find a different view. Take the immigration debate that happened a couple of years ago. There was an attempt to put the immigration foes into the sphere of deviance, but it didn't work at all. But if you look at Canada for instance, you will find no, I mean absolutely no discussion on the major issues of the day. Immigration policy? Cast in Bronze. Health care? What to debate? Hate speech? It took a major miscalculation by the powers that are to bring any discussion forward. Abortion? Isn't that bordering on hate speech? Etc. There are real issues involved here, no matter what side one is on. But public discussion is non existent, and if anyone says anything they immediately by all parties are condemned as some kind of dangerous crank. Bloggers have broken some of the walls down. It comes down to numbers. A small country has proportionately a small number of influential bloggers. Too many controversies, not enough bloggers. The danger for newspapers as a business is when your lines of spheres are vastly different than the ones of your readership. All of a sudden you have none. Readership that is. Derek Posted by: dkite at January 12, 2009 9:56 PM | Permalink I'm sorry but this is fundamentally silly. In the sense that it is obvious that some ideas and ways of framing would be perceived as more legit than others. The three frames are arbitrary (effectively legit, semi-legit, wacko) and also somewhat obvious. What in the world doesn't fall into these kind of categories? The argument is simply what is in the categories. Go read the Structure Of Scientific Revolution, Kuhn's pivotal work on how science works in terms of moving from wacko to legit. In science we have replicable results and still the movement is slow. As it should be. The threshold for legit needs to be high. Otherwise we'd have policy decided on horoscopes and messages from gray bearded creators. Oh, wait, we do have that, don't we? Well, that's another post... Most wacky ideas are just that - wacky. And wrong. A few turn out to be right. The ones that are right endure the process and move to legitimacy and acceptance. The process is slow, and imperfect, but fundamentally works. The alternative is an intellectual relativism that would diminish our ability to accurately portray reality. It's a process that's like like liberal democracy - not perfect, but better than anything else so far. Posted by: Curmudgeon at January 12, 2009 10:20 PM | Permalink In other news, we now have the Obama administration's strategy of Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 12, 2009 10:24 PM | Permalink Glen Greenwald isn't marginalized by the mainstream press because he's anti-Israel. We have entire news networks who have been clearly shown to have dropped their pants and bent over for Hezbollah's propaganda ministry (cough) Reuters (/cough). Greenwald hasn't evolved beyond his Slate columns and his blog because the man is utterly incapable of editing himself to make a coherent point in the space alloted. The news media has shown itself time and again to be useful idiots for Hamas and Hezbollah. Greenwald has only himself to blame.
Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 12, 2009 10:38 PM | Permalink sphere of legitimate debate: sphere of illegitimate debate: Posted by: Bub at January 12, 2009 11:11 PM | Permalink In the past there was nowhere for this kind of sentiment to go. Now it collects, solidifies and expresses itself online. Bloggers tap into it to gain a following and serve demand. Journalists call this the “echo chamber,” which is their way of downgrading it as a reliable source. But what’s really happening is that the authority of the press to assume consensus, define deviance and set the terms for legitimate debate is weaker when people can connect horizontally around and about the news. This is only half of the story, though. Because the blogging model relies on feedback (which the standard push-press model decidedly does not), all opinions are subject to self-selection. Not only do those with opinions deemed illegitimate by the press locate each other, they ruthlessly reject anybody with an opinion that even slightly diverges from their consensus. We therefore grow very robust orthodoxies for even the wildest viewpoints. One of the ways the press could steer slightly wacky opinions back toward the center of your diagram was to selectively respond to the less wacky portions, making the debate more moderate. This doesn't work for blogs. Any sort of consensus opinion--irrespective of its position in the three spheres--will self-perpetuate. This is wildly corrosive to rational debate. I wasn't wild about the press setting the terms for what was and wasn't worthy of discussion but I'd much prefer that to a system that's resistant to any kind of consensus building. Posted by: TheRadicalModerate at January 12, 2009 11:16 PM | Permalink What is wrong with the press has to do with the fact that for what is in Hallin's circle of deviance is where most American's live. Combine that with the fact that most Americans live in a social construst of an OODA loop getting feedback from their everyday living. The feedback the rank and file American is getting every day is 4 klicks faster than either the political elite or the press that surrounds it. The classic example right now is some 80% of Americans oppose the TARP bailouts. Yet the press present it as a 'save the baby or else' scenario for the economy. But the body politic already know that the bailout has a price tag of high inflation downstream and prefer not to pay the piper. The press is out of the loop on most things that affect most everyday Americans. Echo chamber or a way to define the sphere of legitimate debate? The Emerging Progressive Media Network 2006 The ones that are right endure the process and move to legitimacy and acceptance. Ideas that are *wrong* move to legitimacy and acceptance too. I'd argue that the mortgage meltdown is due in large part to wrong ideas. (Things may work out in the long run, but that reminds me of another quote from Keynes.) Posted by: JJWFromME at January 13, 2009 7:12 AM | Permalink Correct me if I'm wrong, Jay, but I think that's the first embedded graphic - EVAH - on PressThink! Congrats! A lot of what the blogosphere does is kind of police what enters the "sphere of legitimate debate" and the "sphere of consensus." This is a lot of what the earliest political bloggers were up to. For instance, for a while conservatives were trying to push the meme that the 1977's Community Reinvestment Act was responsible for the mortgage meltdown. Perhaps in previous years this meme would have gained more traction... Posted by: JJWFromME at January 13, 2009 9:32 AM | Permalink a belated welcome back, Jay! To me, Hillard's sphere's concept is far less useful than the Overton window, because the Overton window is not merely about "conventional wisdom" and "legitimate debate", but about the dynamism of those concepts. Additionally, I think Hillard's graphic concept would be improved if the circles were defined by thicker "gray areas" rather than thin lines". Indeed, I think that the internet makes Hillard's graphic incomplete -- that a third (outer) circle needs to be added to demonstrate that there are different sectors within the "sphere of deviance" to reflect the end of atomization of the audience (for example, 'criticism of Israel' is in the overall 'sphere of deviance' but normative within 'the left', nevertheless 'driving the Jews into the sea' is considered 'deviant' even within the left.) In other words, "echo chamber or counter sphere" is the wrong question -- the answer is a "third ring" that suggests where the new areas of legitimate debate will emerge from -- its not a counter sphere, but in the region of the 'sphere of deviance' closest to the sphere of controversy.
Posted by: p.lukasiak Jay's doughnut analogy accurately describes the mechanics of how consensus is manufactured, but I don't think it really captures the intentionality in the process. The established media -- particularly the Washington-based political media -- are not passive agents here. They have an overt bias for consensus and against "deviancy", which means they want the doughnut hole to be as big as possible and they want to exclude as much "deviancy" as possible from admission to the sphere of "legitimate" debate. The result is that the doughnut itself keeps getting thinner. Issues, particularly big issues, tend to migrate inward, into the sphere of conventional wisdom (the intelligence proves there are WMDs in Iraq; financial deregulation promotes economic growth; the Social Security system is going bankrupt) while alternative -- or even worse, radical -- points of view, which might enliven the sphere of "legitimate" debate are consistently excluded. But the gatekeepers are hardly value neutral. As Jay notes, they largely reflect the biases of their sources -- but they also tend to share those same biases, the common denominator of which is the need to preserve the power and privilege of the status quo, of which the gatekeepers are themselves a part, and not a trivial one. Even the exceptions to the rule tend to prove the larger point. Based solely on the evidence, for example, the issue of global climate change should have long since migrated inward to the sphere of consensus. But the establishment media, by and large, stubbornly preserves the fiction that there is a legitimate scientific debate -- much as an earlier generation of journalists (their salaries partially funded by the Marborough Man) helped drag out the "debate" over the health hazards of smoking. It's hard to overlook the pattern here: Issues or ideas that pose a threat to powerful interest groups (sometimes based on voting power, as in Jay's example of David Brody being admitted to the Meet the Press charmed circle, but more often based on financial or bureacratic power) get treated one way by the gatekeepers; issues or ideas that benefit those same groups are handled another way. I know it sounds shrill, but instead of a doughnut I'm sort of reminded of Hannah Arendt's totalitarian onion, in which each layer shields the one underneath from contact with external reality, creating a perfectly self-contained pseudoreality in which the party (and/or The Leader) can always be right. Fortunately, we don't live in a totalitarian society, so there are inherent limits on the gatekeepers' ability to follow their own biases to such extreme ends (one of those limits, thank God, being the rise of interconnected media). Still, Big Media had its dysfunctional way in the public forum for many years, the result being that we now find ourselves and our democracy (such as it is) in a pretty big hole. Posted by: billmon at January 13, 2009 11:21 AM | Permalink pluk-- I think you're missing the point here. It's not an overton window, left-right issue. It's what billmon (oh how we missed you--it was like digby had left us) said. The issues in the sphere of consensus serve the oligopolies that are deeply entwined with the government. That illegal electronic surveillance could make its way into the sphere of consensus is just one illustration. It's true that support of those oligopolies tends to be to the right of center, but it's not about that. It's about raw, naked power. And the emerging consensus that torture was excusable playfulness is another illustration. I hope billmon is right--that there is enough democracy in the US that this trend can be reversed. But the drift to facism (by which I mostly mean a government/monopolist integration operating at the expense of consumers/taxpayers/workers,rather than pure authoritarianism) is now quite pronounced. Dislodging Big Pharma, Agribusiness, telecommunications, defense contractors is going to be very difficult. They define the sphere of consensus, and what is impermissible to discuss. Posted by: jayackroyd at January 13, 2009 11:56 AM | Permalink I know it sounds shrill, but instead of a doughnut I'm sort of reminded of Hannah Arendt's totalitarian onion... That's actually not too different from Tanenhaus's notions delivered at the AEI about a "Ceasarist presidency" and a "presidential party" (linked to above). And Tanenhaus is a conservative. (Although he's just talking about the conservative movement and the Bush presidency--and not the chattering class in Washington as a whole.) Posted by: JJWFromME at January 13, 2009 11:59 AM | Permalink An alternative take on the "echo-chamber," or as Jay describes it, the "people [who] can connect horizontally around and about the news." "This virtual battle is as dangerous as the real thing" http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090112/OPINION/23685062/1080/NEWS Posted by: Matt at January 13, 2009 12:04 PM | Permalink A long-winded, and remarkably self-exculpatory, way of describing the "gatekeeper" function. This is newsworthy and will be discussed; that is not, and will not be mentioned. But hey, if it helps you come to terms with it, knock yourself out. Regards, Posted by: Ric Locke at January 13, 2009 12:24 PM | Permalink The donut/onion image is superb as a snapshot of the predicament being described, but might also be misleading. After all, as Jay's description of "porosity" reminds us, this entire realm of legitimation and its other occurs in time; battles between conceptualizations of real conditions that last year seemed unthinkable but today are pretty much undeniably the case are ongoing in a process more like an infinite regress than a circular, stable environment. The hole in the donut then is not only constantly shifting (against motivated resistance, but also against sheer human reliance upon cliche), but is also elongating in a vector that's self-mirroring - a mise en abyme. Rigorous questioning of the underlying, "irrefutable" assumptions of practicing journalism is perhaps more relevant than an assumption of priestly mysteries for the determination of what constitutes legitimacy. Posted by: tom matrullo at January 13, 2009 12:45 PM | Permalink Great, Great piece Jay. I just heard Len Downie interviewed on NPR and thanks to the miracle of the internet and my own experiences as part of an activated, unatomized, readership I would have had a blast demolishing each and every platitude he uttered based on my close reading of his newspaper and its online versions. But, of course, there's a barrier to entry to that discussion so instead of waiting my turn to be "heard" on the radio I can turn to the internet to express myself and to find like minded people. aimai Also, what the hell, I'd like to point out that religiosity of african americans is a really interesting case of "outside the boundaries" of normal discourse. Before the bush administration brought kow towing to the religious right to a high art I remember watching a white tv newscaster discussing a recent poll, or incident, in which it was made clear that a high percentage of african americans *actually believed in a caring, personal, active god.* The newscaster, raised in a more tight lipped wasp tradition, couldn't conceal her surprised disgust with this magical thinking and she actually blurted out "nobody thinks that, do they?" or some equivalent. That's because african american religiosity had been consigned to the same realm as everything else african american (deviant, backwards, etc...) while just four or so years later to publicly question the religious and social beliefs of powerful, prominent, white men like Dobson et al would have been inconceivable--social suicide. aimai Posted by: aimai at January 13, 2009 12:46 PM | Permalink Tim: Yes, first graphic ever. Thanks to Terry Heaton. Ryan Sholin, way back in the thread. The process by which things move from the sphere of deviance into "legitimate debate" is murky, half-conscious, inconsistent. I'm not sure the example you cited (Huffington as candidate, Huffington today) helps much because the marginality of a candidate for office is directly related to the political journalist's estimate that she can win. Deviant ideas that are at 45 percent in the polls would get covered. I don't think its Goodman's presentation that keeps her off Meet the Press; fundamentally, it's what she would say, and the light it would cast backward on the press narrative that defined her narrative as "deviant." Billmon: welcome back to PressThink, and thanks for those observations. When you talk to science journalists, they would tell you that a.) they fought this battle; b.) they were losing at first to the hunger for narrative innocence--a major factor I didn't discuss here, aka the balance bias--which expressed itself as "...but skeptics say," then c.) they fought this to a draw and d.) more recently they feel they are winning and a "consensus on climate" is finally being brought home as a kind of newsy insistence. Here's a piece that gets at some of it, from CJR. Of course, not all would agree. However, I think you chose an excellent example for further unfolding the analysis I present here. Atrios linked to this post with this: Consensus and Deviancy Jay Rosen discusses the conventional wisdom generation and status quo perpetuation machine that is our elite political-media industrial complex. I don't know about that. But I think the people who do know and can explain it are ex-reporters who have withdrawn from the culture of daily newswork and retain affection for journalism. But they have no stake in the perpetuation of certain fictions that seem, when you're in the middle of it, to be really important ground to "hold." That's my guess. They know. Dan Weintraub, who commented here, might know more. He covers politics in Sacramento. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 13, 2009 12:53 PM | Permalink A long-winded, and remarkably self-exculpatory, way of describing the "gatekeeper" function. The bottom line is, though, who are you to tell me what's newsworthy? I can decide for myself, and share it with other people who can do the same. And some time in the future, you may be forced to recognize that I was the one with the right judgment. For example: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2007/03/13/where_credit_is_due/ Of course this is no guarantee that I will get it right, but if I do, continually, that's something... Posted by: JJWFromME at January 13, 2009 12:55 PM | Permalink A long-winded, and remarkably self-exculpatory, way of describing the "gatekeeper" function. The bottom line is, though, who are you to tell me what's newsworthy? I can decide for myself and share it with other people who can do the same. And some time in the future, you may be forced to recognize that I was right. For example: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2007/03/13/where_credit_is_due/ Of course, no guarantee I will be right, even if I was right before. But if I'm continually right, that's something... Posted by: JJWFromME at January 13, 2009 12:57 PM | Permalink Assorted: Daniel Weintraub nails it. The notion that the press was some single-minded beast pushing for the Iraq War, or even simply "allowing" it to happen with little complaint, is a deeply flawed piece of conventional wisdom. It's so wildly offbase, it's gotten to the point of being bizarre. It's almost as if people became so embarrassed by the war, they needed to create a culprit. And hence "the complicit press" was born. Whitehall wrote: "Frankly, I no longer spend much on traditional journalism (no newspaper, no TV, few magazines) since the internet serves almost all my needs." This sort of proud proclamation never fails to amuse me. Good: The Internet serves your needs. But where do you think "the Internet" gets its news from? Phogg wrote: "Fast foreword to now. There are thousands of engineers. Every 1095 of them writing once every three years equal one story a day. Written, generally, for free. As in costs no money. As in they are writing for their own vanity." That's great. But I'm not interested enough in automobile engines -- nor properly equipped to digest all the technical details -- to seek out 1,095 three-page essays about them. I want someone else to do that, and cull the info that is likely relevant to me, and -- this is really important -- prioritize it against all the other gazillion pieces of information in the world, and present it to me in a digestible, standardized form. I want it in context. A thousand essays floating around the web, part of an infinite array of stuff that exists in the world, is not context for me. I'm happy for someone else to do that heavy lifting. For years I paid 50 cents a day and endured some print ads to receive that effort; now, for the time being, I'm getting it for free, leeching off the remaining folks who still pay the 50 cents and endure the ads. That's not going to last, though. I realize it's all on the verge of going away, because there are too many freeloaders like me at this point. But there's no way it's going away forever. See, here's the thing: Debates like this, in threads like this, on sites like this, are themselves disproportionately one-sided. By definition, we're all Internet aficionados here. We're all information geeks. The idea of a world whose narrative is provided by the 1,095 auto-engine essays and the like isn't daunting to us. But it would be daunting to my mom. It would be daunting to my girlfriend. It would be daunting to my buddies. They're not like us. While they'd never even be able to express it like this, they want somebody collating all this stuff, helping them understand what's important, placing it all in context. They want a quick understanding of what other people understand about the world. Whether that role is undertaken by the current crop of people we call "journalists," or by some new group of people doing basically the same thing, I'm pretty sure that when all is said and done, the market is going to make sure it exists. Because there is absolutely a demand for it, even if most folks can't actually articulate their desire for it. Posted by: Christopher M at January 13, 2009 12:59 PM | Permalink I don't know about that. Ah, well, I remember the Froomkin Flap. And the Posties seemed to be willfully refusing to understand that the "both sides are mad at us, and therefore we are doing fine" thing simply wasn't relevant to that discussion. It's like Joe Klein's unwillingness to cop to stenographing lies from Hoekstra. there's a point where their inability to comprehend goes beyond plausibility. (Just read Fallows' 1996 book Breaking the NewsK. He quotes someone as saying that way too often the press behaves like an amnesic stenographer.) Posted by: jayackroyd at January 13, 2009 1:04 PM | Permalink Daniel Weintraub nails it. Actually, this is a variant on the "we did too report on it" thing, where Judy Miller runs on the front page and the debunking stories run on A17. yes, there was broad opposition to the invasion. And, yes, there were print journalists who were pointing this out. But on the television, it was very different. And the television, for better or worse, sets the agenda. Greg Mitchell's collection of E&P posts So Wrong for So Long documents this in real time. Posted by: jayackroyd at January 13, 2009 1:15 PM | Permalink Christopher M, of course you're right, but that's starting to wander off topic for this discussion. I will, of course, cheerfully follow, as always -- Sorters and aggregators and summarizers and checkers -- editors -- are of course vitally needed. But the person who's going to flip through 1095 three-page essays on automobile engines and distil it down into something people who don't care to delve deeply can use need something modern journalism doesn't have, and in fact comes dangerously close to rejecting as anti-journalism: that person must have enough expertise in the operation of automotive engines to separate the wheat from the chaff. A J-school graduate who barely knows how to open the hood on his own car and would be totally stymied by a '52 Studebaker doesn't qualify, and in fact is more likely to distort the information than to transmit it. Regards, Posted by: Ric Locke at January 13, 2009 1:15 PM | Permalink Josh Marshall on the people who email him: “Hundreds of people out there send clips and other tips,” Marshall said. “There is some real information out there, some real expertise. If you’re not in politics and you know something, you’re not going to call David Broder. With the blog, you develop an intimacy with people. Some of it is perceived, but some of it is real.” Posted by: JJWFromME at January 13, 2009 1:32 PM | Permalink Daniel Weintraub nails it. The notion that the press was some single-minded beast pushing for the Iraq War, or even simply "allowing" it to happen with little complaint, is a deeply flawed piece of conventional wisdom I don't know where you are getting your conventional stuff, but you should try the hand made wisdom I'm trying to put down here. I said two things about war coverage. 1.) It was a huge failure not to examine critically enough Bush's case for war, and part of the reason was: they stamped "consensus" on it, in error. At this point that is an uncontroversial opinion in journalism itself. 2.) "Mentally placing the war’s opponents in the sphere of deviance was another category error," I said, which contributed to the failures listed in 1.) I didn't say the press pushed for war. I didn't say the press refused to cover demonstrations. Here's my sense: Washington journalists thought the "serious people" (as Atrios calls 'em) did not have radical doubts and therefore there were no radical doubts necessary to have, if you were in the press. The people who had the radical doubts were the radicals, the dirty f*cking hippies, the sufficiently deviant group. This was the illusion. It was not true, but it held forth. "Don't get too far out in front on this thing..." Do you remember those words? (Hint: Matt Cooper was on the other end of the phone.) The man who spoke them was speaking to a fear factor that's real in Washington: "too far out in front" means you're getting beyond the sphere of legitimate debate. Do you want to go there? The rest of your comment, Christopher M, I pretty much endorse. Thanks. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 13, 2009 1:35 PM | Permalink It's not a model of the press but of normative language and reference in any social group. Ask an anthropologist. And compare Hallin's model with this one. It's more dynamic. Posted by: seth edenbaum at January 13, 2009 1:46 PM | Permalink I don't know where you are getting your conventional stuff, but you should try the hand made wisdom I'm trying to put down here. Sorry, my comment may have inadvertently blurred some lines. I wasn't so much reacting to the specific characterization in your post, Jay, as bouncing off Weintraub's comment. I was using the opportunity to make a broader point about, yes, the conventional wisdom. I knew I shouldn't have stuck that part at the beginning of my comment. I didn't intend it for it be a predominant point. Posted by: Christopher M at January 13, 2009 1:51 PM | Permalink I like this doughnut hole model. Thank you. If I might expand on the concept a little, I think there are actually three sets of spheres: my individual one, the one portrayed in the major media/establishment, and the actual spheres of the collective populace. In the atomized world, I see my spheres, and those of the press, and can fulminate about how biased the press is, but will typically either gravitate towards the "mainstream" view or accept the "deviant" label for myself, even if my spheres are closer to the actual consensus position. This is the world in which the Overton Window proves most effective. What the emergence of the blogs and the coalescing of the atoms facilitates is a better picture of the actual spheres of consensus and debate within the population. This in turn exposes the gap between that and the media spheres, the "difference between making sense and making news". This does not in itself improve (for whatever definition of improve you want) the sphere of public debate, but it does have two positive impacts: first, it removes much of the "bizzaro world" feeling one experiences living in an atomized world (the feeling that Jon Stewart conveys so well), and second, it tends to dissipate the power concentration in the "establishment". Both of these tend, I believe, to facilitate better (and broader) debate, with spheres more closely tied to the actual positions of the populace, and debates that are more meaningful to more people. Posted by: ToonArmy at January 13, 2009 1:55 PM | Permalink By the way, on the subject of the "echo chamber being good/bad for debate," this Henry Farrell dialog with Cass Sunstein was pretty good on that topic: http://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/03/deliberation-vs-participation-in-blogs/ Posted by: JJWFromME at January 13, 2009 1:59 PM | Permalink This is helpful, Jay, but I think it also repeats some of the points made by Justin Lewis's book Constructing Public Opinion (Columbia UP, 2001). Lewis wrote that book on the basis of the first Gulf war, but most of that book's observations were prescient for the Iraq war, too. The interesting thing was that this was an "academic left" critique of the press that has traveled closer to CW since the advent of Jon Stewart and the blogosphere. DM Posted by: Dave Mazella at January 13, 2009 2:18 PM | Permalink Yeah, I think that's true. There's one part that I have been trying to add for years, and I feel that I have failed at explaining it well enough. The problem is having to demonstrate your political innocence all the time, and to craft an ongoing narrative that has "determination not to endorse" written through and through it. The press kind of strangled itself on that. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 13, 2009 2:25 PM | Permalink And what after all is the "legitimate sphere of debate" on Israel right now? What was it last year? What is it in Europe? Atrios links to this post but has said literally nothing over the past weeks about Gaza. If the events of last week had happened in 2007 he would have mumbled something inconsequential. There's no such thing as a "reality based" community. There never has been and never will be. The belief in such a fiction is a betrayal of the moral obligation to doubt, even your own assumptions. We have a hard time telling perception from fact, even in retrospect. There is no doctrine that will allow us to transcend that. The reality based community is just another variant of American exceptionalism. "Serious work in journalism" If the press treated every president regardless of party the same way it treats Britney Spears we'd be better off. What we need is an end once and for all to the self-important serious press and a return to the vulgar adversarial press, an ambulance chasing press. Posted by: seth edenbaum at January 13, 2009 2:32 PM | Permalink I'm sorry but I don't want my lawyer singing duets as Dave Edmunds to the prosecutor's Nick Lowe. What's so funny about adversarialism? Posted by: seth edenbaum at January 13, 2009 2:53 PM | Permalink But how does this kind of sentiment collect, solidify, and express itself online? What does the resultant sphere of legitimate debate look like? Is there still one set of three nested spheres? Do all three dissolve to a blur, their respective centers scattering just as their edges vanish? Something in between? Maybe individuals on the left and the right, in America, will find it profitable to cluster, forming their own semi-coherent, very porous nests of spheres. Imagine some analog to this: Those two nests might overlap at different levels. There may be no overlap in the day-to-day spheres of consensus, but the two larger spheres of legitimate debate might overlap for some issues. We might call this something like agreeing to disagree, which sounds pretty glum but doesn't have to be. Agreeing to disagree on the issues seems to me to leave lots of room for basically full agreement on deeper, formative principles of democracy. It might mean, just for instance, that while we disagree on whether we ought to require all voters to present state-issued picture identification at the polls, we also all agree that everyone ought to have the basic right to vote. Posted by: Josh Young (jny2cornell) at January 13, 2009 2:59 PM | Permalink What a great article. And it explains a dynamic which has become center to discussion about the media, that both the right and the left complain about bias and the media uses that as a way to say: “yes indeed, we are doing our job. Look both the right and the left are criticizing us.” In fact, the right and left criticize media , at least in part, because of the way it decides which topics are or aren't open for discussion. The fact that such decision are made in a arbitrary, often personality driven way by people who are at the center of media culture is fair criticism by both the right and left. The right does have kooky ideas – Clinton death list, should us be preparing for, trying to hasten the end-times, man's involvement in climate change – (as well as the left too) but the way in which such topics are included or excluded from public discourse appears capricious. Posted by: atiab at January 13, 2009 3:01 PM | Permalink "It's not a model of the press but of normative language and reference in any social group. Ask an anthropologist." -- seth. I agree with that. Hallin's diagram is lightly adapted from a norm structure we can recognize from many other situations. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 13, 2009 3:20 PM | Permalink first, it removes much of the "bizzaro world" feeling one experiences living in an atomized world The way I like to put this is that the web made it possible for me (and others) to discover that I wasn't the only one ranting, throwing things at the television. Posted by: jayackroyd at January 13, 2009 3:23 PM | Permalink More goblygook buzzwords from the liberal intelligensia trying to justify the hatemongering blogs. Sarah Palin will return and blow you all away like a breath of fresh air. Palin 2012! Posted by: Norine at January 13, 2009 3:27 PM | Permalink Been reading lots of Jane Singer lately for thesis research, so this strikes a chord with me. Can't get the themes from her piece about the journalist as a socially responsible existentialist out of my head when I read this. So the question I have is, is this a problem? Audience automization overcome? And if so, for whom? Or is it too soon to tell? I love the line about the gap between making news and making sense. But isn't part of the traditional gatekeeping role of the media tied to how they handle the concept of truth? Maybe I'm tying this issue into ethics too much, but it seems to me that this is a critical part of the idea of authority. Posted by: Tiffany Monhollon at January 13, 2009 3:27 PM | Permalink Another sphere is the Monkey Sphere: http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html "The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150." Posted by: Alan at January 13, 2009 4:07 PM | Permalink we also all agree that everyone ought to have the basic right to vote. But we don't agree on that. We don't agree on a number things that seem to be either simple facts (like condoms reduce the chance of pregnancy), or widely held to be so by experts in a field (climate change). Alternative, we don't agree on something that many people find self-evident and indisputable, like the existence of God. That's why I resisted pluk's introduction of the Overton window in this context. There's a correlation, perhaps, on left/right views, but the zone of deviance is not restricted to leftwing ideas, and the sphere of consensus is not restricted to right wing views. IMO, the correlation is related to the sphere of consensus reflecting the interests of the oligopolies that effectively control much of the state's policy making. The Great American Hegemony Project is in the sphere of consensus, even though it is not actually popular with people. We're seeing consensus growing around the idea that the administration needn't be prosecuted for war crimes, or, pretty much an crime. That's not a view that has a political orientation, per se. De facto, it appears to be the case that the impeachment of a Democratic president who gets caught in a perjury trap is in the sphere of discussion. Butthe impeachment of a President who committed war crimes, violated the presidential records act, refused to comply with Congressional subpoenas and colluded to violate the Fourth Amendment is in the sphere of deviance. In this case, neither the crime nor the coverup was sufficient to bring about congressional action--not least because the discussion was in journalistic sphere of deviance. (I still find that kinda jawdropping, by the way.) Posted by: jayackroyd at January 13, 2009 4:07 PM | Permalink Audience atomization overcome is basically a good thing. It's not that it replaces journalism, destroys journalism, or overcomes journalism, it just changes the media situation in society generally, which forces journalism to adapt and change. De-atomizing in particular alters the balance of power, as many have said here, and the distribution of knowledge, especially "we are not nuts" knowledge (and look how many of us there are...) which I called in my piece, "realizing their number." However, "confirmation bias" is also a real thing, a constant danger, and there are probably more and better ways to do that today. We have a better cocoons too. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 13, 2009 4:14 PM | Permalink billmon: Even the exceptions to the rule tend to prove the larger point. Based solely on the evidence, for example, the issue of global climate change should have long since migrated inward to the sphere of consensus. But the establishment media, by and large, stubbornly preserves the fiction that there is a legitimate scientific debate... Again, you see the impact of the anti-communists-turned-libertarian-Stalinists: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio#t=53m13s Posted by: JJWFromME at January 13, 2009 5:07 PM | Permalink This article brought an Aha! moment for me. Thanks for that. The Hallin model is simple, but it captures and conveys a lot. It pleases me to see a mention of it as a model of cultural change as well, and to see some further mentions of anthropology and social norms in the comment stream. It's been my experience that it's difficult to get people to notice their cultural norms at all, much less to question those norms. No surprise, then, that participants in the (sub)culture of journalism might have trouble seeing their norms in operation. Good stuff! Thanks for contributing this perspective. Great post, fascinating thread. The dimensions of the donut, and what's in it and what's beyond it, are shaped by a swirl of forces, some of which have barely entered this discussion. Let's start with the deeply sophisticated propagandists (in the Bernays sense of the word) who work relentlessly in behalf of their clients to shove certain issues into the consensus hole and to consign their opponents and critics to the outer space of deviance. The propagandists work for commercial, political and religious interests, and they get smarter every day. Donut-shaping is a multibillion-dollar business, spending many multiples of the salaries of all news reporters in the land combined. Then let's consider the economic interests of publishers and broadcasters: These interests have a huge impact on the shape what gets covered by determining donut dimensions. Should newspaper A have a special section on fine home furnishings, supported by lots of advertisers, or on health care for people who can't afford health insurance, with none? Guess what people get to read about. And then there's the subtle class solidarity of the tiny coterie of highly visible national journalists and blabberers and the people they cover. The rest of us reporters and editors and bloggers have an impact, too, but it's pretty puny compared to the forces we've said so little about. I'm struck that it's our job to devise powerful new journalistic institutions that are built to stretch the donut both inward and outward so that much more is considered worthy of serious coverage. The way to do this is to use the Web to draw in everyday people as a donut-shaping force, not just rely on the self-selecting and largely elite people who blog. This is absolutely possible with the tools at hand, wisely deployed. Our national discourse and democracy need us to get on with it ASAP.
Posted by: Tom Stites at January 13, 2009 5:57 PM | Permalink Seriously, the sphere of deviance in the US media, notwithstanding the recent election, is quite small. That's really like saying that the horizon is not that far away from where you're standing. Or you can invoke the famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover: once you get over the river, foreshortening kicks in. I can think of an earlier theoretical model for this: Althusser's definition of ideology, and how it establishes "the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" in order to reproduce the status quo. Posted by: Nick S at January 13, 2009 6:49 PM | Permalink Regarding the swirl noted by Stites: 1. what would a map of those (and other) operative forces and their interrelationships look like? 2. what are the probabilities of determining whether, at any given time, there is enough transparency within a specific sphere to map those forces reliably? 3. would the yield of these factors be something like the distance practicing journalism and the reality it allegedly reports? Posted by: tom matrullo at January 13, 2009 6:54 PM | Permalink The "Press" abdicated their authority long ago. Posted by: The Boise Picayune at January 13, 2009 6:57 PM | Permalink "In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized-- connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding." Well said! A melee of sorts rages among parties trying to control opinion. Posted by: A. Nonymous at January 13, 2009 7:02 PM | Permalink Echoing Atrios, the surprising thing isn't that there are consensus views, taboo perspectives, and a range where "objectivity" requires even-handedness, but that journalists don't generally recognize that as their function. The star journalists almost certainly seem to. When they give interviews, their confidence in their ability to determine the boundaries of acceptable discourse is palpable. It's hard to believe they don't know this, that the ability of journalists to shape and even control public opinion wasn't the reason they became journalists in the first place. You can't institutionalize truth, you can only institutionalize formal systems of debate over representations concerning facts. A courtroom is adversarial. The model of the press, even on this thread, remains collaborationist, if not with this administration than with another. Journalists in this country desire to take themselves seriously by seeing themselves as fully aware moral actors. A lawyer by comparison sees himself as moral actor even when defending to the best of his ability a confessed murderer of little old ladies. His moral responsibility is to fulfill his function, even blindly, within the limits of professional ethics. Journalists want to be moral philosophers when they serve democracy best by being hacks. Andrew Marr titles his book Lawyers and Journalists are tradesmen. Philosophize in your spare time. We'll all take you more seriously. Posted by: seth edenbaum at January 13, 2009 7:41 PM | Permalink "audience atomization overcome" is simply restated as the ability to associate. In the past, people would associate directly through clubs, meetings, etc., or indirectly through newsletters, partisan newspapers, etc. Information sharing has always been a component of association, and what was considered consensus, legitimate topics for debate, and deviancy has always been defined within associative groups. What's interesting about the explosive growth of information exchange and sharing made possible across computer networks - and what Jay's essay gets at - is the impact on a decades old monopoly of one-way (broadcast) mass media information providers. Andy Cline recently reminded that there are no cogent definitions of 'news.' But if you decide a thing is not news and complain, then the news (information) provider will tell you that you don’t know what news is. This is the act of defining what's consensus, legitimate and deviant. Worse, the information provider is likely to dismiss your complaint by impugning your motive. There is a downside to "audience atomization overcome" (echo chambers or close-minded associations), which I tried to describe in Lippman-Dewey Blogosphere. The simplicity of Hallin's model is useful. It is not an excuse to adopt victim-status by proclaiming you've been ostracize for your ideas (a very strong associative pathetic appeal). Jay, Andy posted in reply: The Yummy Donut of Status Quo Bias Tim - following your Lippman-Dewey link, this jumped out at me: "Even if the participants themselves do not frame their activities as a political contest, media figures—the new intermediaries in politics—can show that they are too savvy to be taken in. Unmasking the "real" meaning of events, reporters reveal the attempts of one side or another to gain political advantage over its rivals in the governing process. Translating the campaign "spin" and finding the "hidden agenda" can be Everyman’s badge of political sophistication in the modern media culture." [bf mine] So my neighbor the social worker is telling me about her client with breast cancer who can't afford chemo and who has to keep working because she's a single mom, and I'm wondering if I'll be finding myself in a similar situation. But the "savvy" media figures continue to insist on explaining the real meaning of this or that candidate's health care proposal. Which is how it plays as a campaign strategy. While I really don't give a shit how it plays - I want to know if I can get health care if I get sick. Somehow, the horse race is in the center of that donut and my interest in something like "medicare for all" single-payer, which I would dearly love to hear an actual discussion of, is banished to the outer realms of deviance. What Jay said. Posted by: Janet Strange at January 13, 2009 9:10 PM | Permalink Hi Jay, great article. Much of what you say reminds me of Schattschneider's argument about the political scope of our conflicts. Himself, Hallin, Wylie, McCombs, and others all touch on similar ideas in a broader respect. kuddos. Posted by: Parisa at January 13, 2009 10:02 PM | Permalink And again: It's not even that I'm bothered by the obliviousness to specific circumstances -my point after all is that people are frail and fallible- it's the obliviousness even to its possibility. Posted by: seth edenbaum at January 13, 2009 10:46 PM | Permalink Following your Twitter about energy cost of Google search, as ginned up on Sunday and exposed on Monday: Who at the Times cooked up the story? Why? Were editors unaware? And what IS the energy cost of a Google search? Just curious. Posted by: Jeff Fobes at January 13, 2009 11:18 PM | Permalink seth: I don't write about the conflict in Palestine and I have nothing to add that has not been said seven zillion times. Occasionally I quote someone for purposes of making other observations. Andrew Cline, The Yummy Donut of Status Quo Bias The news media believe “the system works.” During the “fiasco in Florida,” recall that the news media were compelled to remind us that the Constitution was safe, the process was working, and all would be well. The mainstream news media never question the structure of the political system. The American way is the only way, politically and socially. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 13, 2009 11:39 PM | Permalink Jay, I'm honestly puzzled about the meaning of this sentence, if this was addressed to my comment about the increasing acceptance of this kind of press-critique since the advent of the blogs: There's one part that I have been trying to add for years, and I feel that I have failed at explaining it well enough. The problem is having to demonstrate your political innocence all the time, and to craft an ongoing narrative that has "determination not to endorse" written through and through it. Who is demanding that bloggers (or is it journalists?) demonstrate "political innocence"? Why is this "determination not to endorse" so important? Who is interested in this kind of self-legitimation? It seems to me that the greatest strength of Atrios's position is his rhetorical stance that he is "just a stupid blogger," saying things in public that others could just as well have said themselves. Thanks, DM Posted by: Dave Mazella at January 13, 2009 11:57 PM | Permalink Jeez, Jay, not a bad piece considering your best efforts to sabotage it. You know what? Your model of media consensus/controversy/deviance will have anybody who thinks for themselves nodding in agreement regardless of their specific viewpoint. But your persistent attempts to cast your own hobby horses as the persecuted minorities will strike all, er, otherly deviant readers as ludicrous. (Single payer health care is in the sphere of deviance? Give me a break. You sound just like Rush Limbaugh railing about the liberal media.) Almost a great piece, but it won't travel far. Posted by: ArtD0dger at January 14, 2009 12:25 AM | Permalink Dave: "The problem is having to demonstrate your political innocence all the time" refers to demands on professional journalists who have to show that they align themselves with no one, and have no agenda, and thus take the view from nowhere. It's not enough to be that way; they need to find the means to continually show it-- one might almost say show it off. That's what I meant by their "determination not to endorse." It wasn't specifically addressed to your comment. It's just a factor in what journalists do that tends be be under-weighted: their need to demonstrate deatchment, neutrality, nonalignment, professional distance. Simplest method: politics as a game, journalists as savvy analysts up in the booth, sizing up the strategies and what the players have to do to win. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 14, 2009 12:35 AM | Permalink "The news media believe 'the system works.' ” The point of my Gaza references was not the M.E. itself; I thought my references to trade-craft made that clear. My point is this, I'll say it again and I'm out: Your response to me bringing up the Middle East was tellingly passive, and it's the passivity that's the problem. I'd have been happier if you'd started screaming like an enraged Likudnik. I would known what you believed and where you stood and I would have been able to judge for myself and engage you. As it is I know nothing about your response to the biggest news of the new year. But considering your silence and your vocal response to other issues I can guess. I read my news on the web because I get it mostly from academics, scholars and activists, in the US, Europe, and the Middle East who are experts in the fields that journalists pretend to know about, and are fluent in the languages that journalists pretend to read. I read historians before I read theoreticians of the present [cf."Media Studies"]. I read Reidar Visser before and after I read any journalist on Iraq. I read the webpages of people who would otherwise be publishing op-eds, in other countries if not this one. They're the ones who filter the news for me, more than reporters do. And I don't read legal reporters when I can read lawyers. Intellectuals are always biased, it's their job. There are two kinds of corruption in any social network: the corruption of idiots who support each other out of friendship, who back each other up and help each other up the ladder; and the corruption of intelligent and imaginative people with curious minds who support each other out of friendship, back each other up, and help each other up the ladder. Posted by: seth edenbaum at January 14, 2009 1:13 AM | Permalink "Simplest method: politics as a game, journalists as savvy analysts up in the booth, sizing up the strategies and what the players have to do to win" No. You're out there with the players. Your readers are all the analysts, each for themselves, in consultation with their friends. I'm out. That's why I resisted pluk's introduction of the Overton window in this context. There's a correlation, perhaps, on left/right views, but the zone of deviance is not restricted to leftwing ideas, and the sphere of consensus is not restricted to right wing views. Jay, I didn't mean to suggest that everything was "left/right", rather that the Overton window was a better way of visualizing the dynamics of public debate. That's why I suggested an outer ring that would contain "deatomized deviance" -- a sector where large numbers of people who hold views outside of the "legitimate controversy" sphere reside. That would include both "the left" and "the right" -- and places where those ideologies mix (for instance, with regard to press coverage of Obama, those on the left who supported Clinton, plus those on the right, agree that the press was in the bag for Obama). I see the Overton window as (primarily) an ideological tool, because its essentially linear. Hillard's graphics. Hillard's graphics are more "political" than ideological -- but I think the graphic itself is inadequate. (PS Hi to Billmon!) Posted by: p.lukasiak One more thought. Think about how different the two demands are. One side demands that Sarah Palin's face get more airbrushing on the cover of Newsweek. That's their idea of fair coverage. "Those Nattering Nabobs!" The other side wants realism and reason in their coverage. Newsweek, on the other hand, wants to sell magazines and perhaps not lose access to the GOP. So it's not surprising that some things fall off the plate and have to be taken up online, outside the contended world of dead trees and TV screens. But then there's the question of the rise of Sarah Palin--the People Magazine candidate. How much flattering did the right have to do get people riled up enough about a Sarah Palin, and cry to the media that she wasn't given the New Ronald Reagan treatment? I think took years of what someone at the National Review once called "Country and Western Marxism"--and this was what Sam Tanenhaus was concerned about, even before Sarah Palin came on the scene. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 14, 2009 10:28 AM | Permalink Often in the world of mainstream journalism, a Brahmin class operates at the level or active, committed participation. These tend to be the editors and or publishers, who serve the interests of the corporation at the pleasure of the corporation. The institution's class motives, its profit motives and those of the merchants it serves, are primary, and it falls to them to edit into and out of reality that which is determined by these interests to fall within or without the sphere of legitimated discourse. At a "lower" level, there can be found passionate people who take it as their task to discern what is the case, as opposed to what is said to be the case, in stories that matter. Theirs is a commitment, but not necessarily to the values of their bosses. It's dismissive to paint all of these folks with the same broad brush. This is not to deny that there is a religion of journalism that thinks it is grounded in the 18th century to which all pay diligent lip service. Onion rings. Posted by: tom matrullo at January 14, 2009 10:31 AM | Permalink Interresting. Looks like E.J. Dionne has already been there. You flatter them to the point where they're useful for you, but uh-oh, what if they actually field their own candidates? Posted by: JJWFromME at January 14, 2009 10:39 AM | Permalink Authority It is not the press' job to be an authority. The job is to report honestly, nothing more, nothing less. When the news media thinks they are the news, we no longer have a free press. Bloggers have called the news media out on their flagrant lack of objectivity. Bloggers are now the journalists, the old journalists are now nothing but shrills for a cause, and 90% favor the same cause. The press is a disgrace. Posted by: tessa at January 14, 2009 11:19 AM | Permalink A Google search recently lead me to an Australian dirty hippie named Alex Carey, who coined the phrase "treetops propaganda": Treetops' propaganda is not directed at the person on the street. It is directed at influencing a select group of influential people: policymakers in parliament and the civil service, newspaper editors and reporters, economics commentators on TV and radio. Its immediate purpose is to set the terms of debate, to determine the kinds of questions that will dominate public discussion — in a word to set the to set the political agenda in ways that are favourable to corporate interests. As this tactic succeeds, public discussion no longer assumes, for example, that affluent societies have a first responsibility to provide jobs for all who want them... Carey's thesis is that these people tend to want to keep things Manichean. He doesn't mention it, but I bet a very useful one is "Normal Americans," vs. dirty f***ing hippies. Even though, as Paul Krugman notes, there are none around anymore except late at night on Nickelodeon. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 14, 2009 12:25 PM | Permalink His prime example of an American treetops propaganda outfit is the AEI. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 14, 2009 12:27 PM | Permalink Janet Strange re: "Somehow, the horse race is in the center of that donut ..." The horse race serves three purposes: 1. Places political journalism firmly in the sphere of consensus about how to measure and predict candidate performance. 2. Ensures the "production of innocence" (read down) for political journalism, by which I mean: fairness/balance = the professional goal for the product objectivity = process to reach goal neutrality = ethos of the process credibility = byproduct of ethos trust = byproduct of credibility innocence = stance taken in regard to the product if the process is followed 3. Follows a Master Narrative that has been "tested" over many cycles, templated, can be easily taught, and reliably rolled out every four years without the thought or risk involved in developing a new model. "...I'm hoping my experience can offer useful contribution to [Jay's] very interesting discussion." Opening paragraph to Observing a Dieing Model of Information Control: When it comes to blogging or journalism, Jay Rosen is smarter than me. He is the living example of academic study dedicated to the science of information. I have one advantage he does not, I've been in the information business of delivering electronic content for 19 years, longer than the internet has been around. While he is a powerful voice in the study of information science, in the online space I have the advantage of understanding information operation strategy and tactics in action at a level he may need CISSP courses just to stay in the conversation. Posted by: Critt Jarvis at January 15, 2009 6:49 AM | Permalink The attempt to inject into the mortgage meltdown discussion the debate over the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act is a good example of treetops propaganda. The Judy Miller episode looks to me like it was an elaborate treetops propaganda effort. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 15, 2009 8:22 AM | Permalink Treetops propaganda is not just out to shape the landscape of information--it's also out to shape notions of the culture for the "select group of influential people," that Carey mentioned above--as in, what should constitute, a priori, respectable opinion and what should not. Check out this David Brooks column from a few months ago about he and his conservative colleagues are concerned about about with the blogosphere: ...Geekdom [has] acquired its own cool counterculture... First of all, this essay is filled with gross generalizations. But the Lionel Trilling reference is not just pulled out of the air. It's about who is gaining cultural authority. Lionel Trilling was a very effective battering ram for the Neocons against the "hippies" back at the beginning of the Reagan era--back when Nixonland was still new. Brooks's column is filled with cultural potshots (he doesn't seem to know quite what to do with the blogosphere)--some of which were picked up and applied by various footsoldiers during the McCain campaign. Nice try, but you're still a bunch of wankers, as Atrios might say. And as far as cultural authority goes, you have far more in common with a philistine horde than an aristocracy. But probably most of the beltway crowd hasn't figured this out quite yet. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 15, 2009 11:06 AM | Permalink Simpler Rosen: Consensus: What there's no need to argue about.... Legitimate Debate: This you can argue about... Deviance: When there's no point in arguing about.... Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 15, 2009 2:06 PM | Permalink Someone else worth reading is Jon Chait on "The Republican Character Machine". If you have a big enough array of media outlets, you can set the *agenda* on what to argue about--in often arbitrary ways. This is what got Bob Somerby started way back when. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 15, 2009 2:36 PM | Permalink Daniel C. Hallin responds to my post and to some of what he read in the comments: Jay did a great job explaining my argument about the three spheres, and it's great to see so much response. There's so much of it that I can't respond carfully to very much of it. But here are a few thoughts about the central question of how the internet affects the process by which the boundaries of legitimate controversy are set. It's probably true that this process is more de-centered now than it once was. In the period I was writing about, the 60s and 70s, a small number of elite news organizations, taking their cues mainly from political elites in Washington, defined these boundaries at the national level. The process has been de-centered, to a significant degree, not just by the internet, but by the rise of talk radio, cable television and various forms of "infotainment," from television talk shows to The Daily Show and the like. (More on this in my article "The Passing of the 'High Modernism' of American Journalism Reconsidered".) Thanks very much, Dan. I agree that the role of the independent press needs to be strengthened, and I do not look forward in the least to any withering away of that capacity. The reasons why it might are multiple and interactive with another. Right now the attention is focused on a collapsing business model, but there's also the problem of collapsing trust and declining authority. I think a strong, independent press can be undermined by thoughtless press bashing, phony populism and culture war excess. Definitely. I also think a strong independent press is undermined when the professionals in it fail to recognize that there's a politics to what they do, which can go wrong, fall out of alignment, or even implode, failing the country. I look forward to what others have to say. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 15, 2009 5:29 PM | Permalink What a remarkably smart post by Daniel C. Hallin. This sentence ought to have wide circulation: "Many of those who posted seem to believe that what is on the internet is closer to 'real public opinion' than what is in the mainstream media, but I'm not sure we really know this." Amen. We have very high hopes that the Internet will be our path to a better-informed, more democratically informed people -- and if we can hope for one more thing it's that this leads to better governance. But as Hallin suggests, we don't really know this. I also second and double-second his observation of journalist-bashing as a potentially harmful sport. There's a good deal of merit involved in some of the criticism, but in many quarters it's moved well beyond that. I agree with Hallin. The role of the independent press needs to be strengthened, not brought down in victory-lap celebration. Daniel C. Hallin, we need much more from you on these subjects. Posted by: David Westphal at January 15, 2009 6:36 PM | Permalink Jay, this is a thought-provoking post, but I especially love Hallin's comment. Usually, as what I guess is a typical college professor nerd ;), I'm bereft when it comes to quoting pop culture, but I'll reference the movie "Charlie Wilson's War" and Patrick Seymour Hoffman's character's fable about the monk who said that while new developments may look either wonderful or bad at the outset, the correct response is always "we'll see." I love new media and and am thrilled at what I see as its potential to enhance the enduring values of journalism. But it's easy to see the emergence of a startlingly like-minded pack, as David Westphal put it the other day, emerge in the new media sphere. Demonizing journalists is easy and cheap, and every single time I actually sit down and TALK to some (not just the big names who dominate the public conversation), they are actually remarkably savvy about what they do. In a study I did that was presented at the AEJMC conference a couple of years ago, a large survey of newspaper journalists at papers of all sizes found that the VAST majority of journalists were dismissive of a distorted, naive view of objectivity as a "mirror" of reality. They readily critiqued their coverage for failing to include enough viewpoints, but rather than ignorance, they pointed to news routines and a fast-paced news cycle as the culprit and offered ideas and solutions. I think it's time we all started working WITH journalists and helping convince the broader public what they do is important rather than puffing any particular medium or group as being somehow better or more prescient. Posted by: Carrie Brown at January 15, 2009 11:10 PM | Permalink Carrie, from the State of the News Media 2008 Journalist Survey: Journalists are ready — even eager — to embrace new technologies. They think a range of new digital activities, from blogs to citizen media, are good for journalism. They even think, by 2 to 1, that splitting their time across multiple platforms is a positive change rather than a problem that is taking time from their reporting or spreading them thin. These are all attitudes hard to imagine a few years ago. Of course an early famous expression of this Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. As a single payer activist it is always frustrating not only being shut out of the mainstream media, but even by mainstream liberals worried about losing their respectability or funding. Heads of Kaiser Family Foundation and HCAN have admitted as much. Recents examples in the health reform debate include the creation of HCAN, the coalition around mandates-based plans and the center-liberla Washington consusensus Building Blocks coalition to shut out single payer from a seat at the table, Commonwealth and RAND excluding single payer... all the while admitting that as pure policy it is best. sigh. I think journalists often play an important role as an independent source of information, and in many ways I'd like to see them playing a stronger role, not a weaker one, in shaping the public sphere. I'd like to see them play that role in a more independent and thoughtful way than they often do, but I would not like to see them vanish from the political scene--which to some extent is actually happening as media companies cut newsroom budgets.They've already done it. One argument against journalists is that they defend corporate and government power. Another says that they defend a 'liberal' elite. The Republican leadership used christian conservatives as a base, but only cater to them enough to get their vote. Rove called them "nuts." The major failure of the press results from its own snobbery. The author of this post as many others do imagines the press as a referee, but that claim is based less on an empirical understanding of the press' important role or of its history than on the wishful thinking of a self-important college kid. The press is a participant in the political game. They should think of themselves as being paid by the people to dig, not by the leadership to tell the people what the leadership wants them to hear. The the press' job is not to judge but to be hungry; to knock on widow's doors and photograph pornographic images of war and violence: to serve the people's voracious "need to know." The left and the nativist right are both justified in their anger. The press represents the interests of the institutional elite. Nativists attack lawyers too, until they want to sue. But the press wants to be the judge and it's not their job, it's ours. Posted by: seth edenbaum at January 16, 2009 5:23 PM | Permalink The After Matter section of this post tracks the reactions in the blogosphere and other buzz. There was quite a bit among other bloggers. So far as I know, there has not been any comment, reaction, link or other gesture from journalists in the national press. This after I told Chris Cillizza, who does The Fix blog for the Washington Post, "I wrote this for you, especially you. When you have a moment, give it a gander." (...I told him that on Twitter.) So far the people in the political press have maintained radio silence, except for David Westphal, who is out of the game now, teaching like I am, and Dan Weintraub, an old friend of mine, who is in Sacramento for the Bee. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 16, 2009 6:25 PM | Permalink A fascinating post and discussion. I just wanted to share a few quick points, without getting into much of the theory. The first point is that to a large extent, this is an American problem. The extensive training and strong ethics of objectivity create the cautious guarding of the boundaries of acceptable debate that create this phenomenon. Here in the UK, the press is more varied, more boisterous and more confrontational. The range of views presented is therefore significantly wider, and when a viewpoint bubbles up that's perceived as dangerously radical, the instinct is to challenge it, not ignore it. This is not necessarily a good thing. Don't fall into the trap of idealising a boisterous media. Some ideas *belong* in the sphere of deviance. We have a serious risk of a measles epidemic in the UK because a few years ago several of the best-selling national newspapers declared, on flimsy evidence, that the MMR vaccine causes autism. We've seen innocent people attacked because the UK's best-selling newspaper, the News of the World, periodically decides to "name and shame" convicted sex offenders. And, yes, our papers are more vigorous in challenging the government over things like Iraq. But surely a situation can be created when knee-jerk opposition to the government is making it impossible for it to actually function? I suppose I'm saying that having a media that's sufficiently cautious to *over*regulate the sphere of debate, while dangerous, may actually be the lesser evil to having a debate that's as debased as ours is becoming. Posted by: Rav Casley Gera at January 16, 2009 6:52 PM | Permalink I have the urge to relate or compare this behavior to the use and treatment - many degrees more conscious, at least potentially - of the word/judgement/imprecation "unserious" in various blogs and blog-clusters over the last few years. Parallel psychological behavior, anyway, although in a more acknowledgedly ideological gamefield (although at moments or at points where a disagreement is being described as not merely ideological or beyond ideological...). By the way, the caption of the diagram itself still shows the name of the author of the book and diagram as Hillard, while the body of this post shows the name of the author as Hallin. This can cause speciation among quoters, and should be fixed. Posted by: Alex Russell at January 16, 2009 7:36 PM | Permalink "The first point is that to a large extent, this is an American problem." A vulgar media is better than a complacent one, and I'd rather have an overly litigious society than one marked by passivity and fatalism. Not all lawyers are ambulance chasers, but most lawyers are jobbing tradesmen not judges. They aren't paid to be moral philosophers but to represent their clients. Who are journalists paid to represent, their subjects or their readers? There's a difference between demagoguery and respect for your audience, between giving the people what they need to make an educated choice and giving the people "what they want" which as often as not may be bread and circuses; but there is no way to legislate that difference. That's what defenders of "reason" fail to understand. Taking yourself seriously is not a strategy for doing a good job at anything. Taking your job seriously is something else entirely. Judges have very specific rules they have to follow, and strict limits on their authority. They have to defend every decision for the public record. What are the rules for journalists in their self-appointed role as judges? There are none. Posted by: seth edenbaum at January 16, 2009 8:11 PM | Permalink I'm starting to wonder if we need to ditch the term "blogger." Does it automatically marginalize someone who blogs as a card-carrying member of the deviant sphere? This comes to mind because of how successful big industry was in tagging people with sensible environmental concerns as "environmentalists." As soon as you attach a term like that to a group, you've succeeded in making them the "other," and thus you disempower them as a bunch of irrelevant loonies. Posted by: gizmo at January 16, 2009 10:51 PM | Permalink Commentators here who think the Iraq War was evenly presented by the media must believe that starting a war is a valid tool of national government. That notion was invalidated last century by the UN, etc. Sharing media space equally between a person who planned to kill, maim, and displace hundreds of thousands of people and destroy a nation's infrastructure and those who disagreed with that plan is like sharing equal media space between a conspiring mass murderer and the police. Further, Bush was spreading blatant propaganda when he claimed that Iraq had WMDs and threatened the safety and security of the USA. The transparent reality was that the USA had WMDs (and has even dropped nukes on Japan) and threatened the safety and security of Iraq. Posted by: Martin Gifford at January 17, 2009 12:19 AM | Permalink I think part of the problem is that on the whole, journalists are just not that educated in the subjects they report on. They know a little bit about a lot of things, and are therefore dependent on what they perceive as accepted wisdom to report an event by deadline. The trade itself also lends itself to the analysis. column inches are a valuable commodity. As a story develops, the media doesn't want to go back and report and reanalyze old news, so an event or idea is set, and only the new news gets a special analytical treatment in any story. Posted by: TJ1 at January 17, 2009 12:50 AM | Permalink Actually, you hit on something that I think is extremely important to why the press keeps so strictly to the consensus narrative: the implied cost of re-writing the old narrative and the possibility that entire sections of it, already "in the books," as it were, would look like they were falsified or in need of drastic revision, if the deviant views were brought in. There's an almost unconscious law operating involving a "conservation of narratives." Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 17, 2009 1:30 AM | Permalink Here's the problem. The blogworld, by and large, has its own similar structure. Note the number of people banned from Kos over the years, for being too liberal, too Green (me, both counts) or other things. Or, when on some MSLBs (Mainstream Liberal Blogs), I mention the need for parliamentary government, I get either ignored or hooted down. So, the diagram and the problems you mention exist to some degree in blogworld, too. As Glenn would say, per his using the word about Bush, it’s probably part of the Manichean nature of the American press — two issues, two sides, therefore, cosmic dualism! Posted by: SocraticGadfly at January 17, 2009 2:52 AM | Permalink More on "hippies." Kevin Drum on a reporter's reaction to the 2007 YearlyKos convention: Hendrik Hertzberg, comparing YearlyKos to similar convocations of his youth, remarks on just how normal everyone looks... What's happening now isn't a youth revolt, and it's not powered by free love, free acid, or fear of being drafted. It's powered by a lot of bog ordinary moderate liberals who have been radicalized by George Bush and the Newt Gingrichized Republican Party. I think a lot of journalists (though I don't mean to include Hertzberg here) don't quite get this because they haven't internalized just how far off the rails the modern Republican Party has gone. Until they do, they're going to continue to misunderstand what's happening. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 17, 2009 10:17 AM | Permalink re: "conservation of narratives" From above: Information sharing has always been a component of association, and what was considered consensus, legitimate topics for debate, and deviancy has always been defined within associative groups.Changing the consensus narrative is an act of challenging the current bonds of association, or riskier, the loss of old associations in an act of independance or the hope of new ones. Challenge the consensus narrative or the traditional storylines found in journalism, and you're very likely to here the tenets of journalism's religion defending itself ... and conserving it's narratives. For anyone interested in this kind of criticism of journalism, or interested in thinking deeply about their practice of journalism, two links for further study: seth edenbaum, The author of this post as many others do imagines the press as a referee, but that claim is based less on an empirical understanding of the press' important role or of its history than on the wishful thinking of a self-important college kid.The history of the referee. Here's another good example of "treetops propaganda" relevant to this story. Greg Mitchell did an analysis of a widely reported story purporting that the small donor, who had such an impact in Obama's election, was a "myth." This was an important message for certain parties to make into conventional wisdom, because the small internet-enabled donor really changes the game: The Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) study disclosing that Barack Obama actually raised most of his campaign money from "larger" not "small" donors has gained wide, approving, coverage in recent days, from USA Today to the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and countless web sites, even making Huffington Post at least twice, including as a top link. Inevitably the headlines refer to the "myth" of Obama riding a wave of small donations to victory. That study's author himself uses it. I'd encourage you to read the rest of what Greg Mitchell is saying. But suffice it to say the statistics were skewed in some clear ways to suggest the conclusion that Michael Malbin wanted, when a common sense interpretation would say just the opposite. So why are they worried enough to promulgate this kind of misleading story? Just why are they telling this bedtime story to the beltway press and others? It's because small donors are a gamechanger. This is Peter Daou, an Internet strategist for Hillary Clinton: The pyramid of Internet political functions consists of message (communications), money (fundraising) and mobilization. Atop that pyramid sits communications. Message drives money and triggers mobilization. Devoid of a compelling message to spur their use, the most advanced web tools will lie fallow. The impetus to use technology is always external to the technology; the impulse to connect and contribute begins with the inspiration to do so and the inspiration derives from the message. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 17, 2009 11:35 AM | Permalink JJW, since you brought it up, I think campaign financing is one of the top stories of the 2008 election cycle, for five reasons: 1. The increasing amounts raised, highlighted by Obama's record breaking amount during an economic recession and high public debt. 2. Obama was the first Presidential candidate to opt out of public financing for the election since public financing was enacted. 3. Transparency issues raised during the campaign by numerous watchdog groups, how the campaigns responded, how the national parties responded, and the press coverage. 4. Lessons learned by politicans/the public from financing methods and results of the 2008 Presidential and Congressional campaigns and how future campaigns may interpret and implement those lessons. 5. Resolution of existing concerns about fund raising online that will prove/disprove current or future partisan complaints. Persuasion is a form of influence. It is the process of guiding people toward the adoption of an idea, attitude, or action by rational and symbolic (though not only logical) means. It is a problem-solving strategy, and relies on "appeals" rather than force. There are four basic aspects: And credible parties should be the ones with the most influence. If certain parties consistently push misleading information (see above references to "treetops propaganda"), maybe their arguments shouldn't be simply passed off to the public, treated as uncontroversial, treated as equivalent to other, more reliable pieces of information, etc. (see War, Iraq, among other issues). Posted by: JJWFromME at January 17, 2009 2:57 PM | Permalink I completely agree: the establishment press should be establishing a sphere of unreliability to the point of being crazy wrong and put into it those who deserve it, BUT: * If the sphere system and its judgments are not transparent, it may be impossible to generate enough trust to sustain the judgment. * Don't do it unless you are from time to time willing to place in the sphere of unreliability to the point of being crazy wrong a major party's campaign for president... for example. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 17, 2009 4:41 PM | Permalink Would a sphere of unreliability to the point of being crazy wrong include most experts or be defined by not meeting even that threshold? What would that do to a reporter's Rolodex? Even When Wrong, Political Experts Say They Were 'Almost Right' The results suggest that political leaders and others may have a hard time learning from history -- or at least learning lessons that don't fit their existing beliefs and ideologies, Tetlock said. When experts were wrong, they interpreted events to fit their preconceived notions, rather than change their notions to fit reality. Some of the popular defenses used by incorrect experts included 'I was almost right" (The predicted events didn't happen, but almost did) and "I was just off on timing" (The predicted events have not occurred yet, but they eventually will).Everybody’s An Expert Jay, In addition to Hallin, you may want to consider Whyte and Janis' work on the phenomenon, "Groupthink". It seems relevant, if not equivalent. We're obviously looking at a human behavior which goes well beyond journalism (see: the Wall Street meltdown). Posted by: shep at January 17, 2009 6:16 PM | Permalink Jay, Thanks for your good work on this topic. As we watch so many established institutions of all sorts fail lately, I wonder if we have a unique opportunity to expand the sphere of "legitimate debate?" It seems to me that the Emperor's Clothes are coming off in a hurry, thus opening the door for a broader range of perspective on matters political, financial, educational, environmental, etc. Posted by: gizmo at January 17, 2009 7:37 PM | Permalink Another fine contribution to the academic blog literature on this subject, Jay, but once again, you exclude us like Meet the Press excludes Amy Goodman. I have a column today that explains once again and in more detail why we have to call it the Web Press, not a blog, for legal reasons. We May Not Have Bush to Kick Around Anymore But we do have much more work to do building the Web Press… It's LocustFork.Net 1.09 Jay: Doug Giebel Posted by: Doug Giebel at January 18, 2009 1:23 PM | Permalink Jay, The link to Weintraub's comment is broken in the After Matter. As you know, I agree with his assessment that the current CW among many (an article of faith, sphere of consensus) about a press failure during 2002-2003 Iraq debate represents an uncritical inability to guard against confirmation bias and historian's fallacy/hindsight bias. However, here are two related links from two "experts" in the media to spur legitimate debate: Scott Ritter's Iraq Complex Right-o. Well, here's one for you. Now they tell us. And here's something very telling from the perspective of this post. The Popular Newsweekly Becomes a Lonely Category. In which we learn that the newsweeklies are coming to specialize more and more in views, as against news. "These days, they are more likely to offer a comprehensive survey of a subject to present an argument or offer a prescription." Interesting. And where do these arguments and prescriptions come from? What is the worldview that lies behind them? The New York Times article is silent on that question: completely silent. It never occurs to the reporter to ask it. Now the View from Nowhere might seem plausible to pro journalists when it comes to gathering news but if you're presenting views--if your value added is now arguments and prescriptions--then you can't continue with that kind of empty-headed rationalization can you? Well, as far as Richard Perez-Pena is concerned, you can. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 18, 2009 4:35 PM | Permalink The answer to your question about the newsweeklies: "And where do these arguments and prescriptions come from?" Newsweek has bet heavily on the writing of name-brand journalists, familiar presences on television as well as in print, like Fareed Zakaria, Mr. Meacham and Christopher Hitchens.I find Massing's 2004 article misleading. I found numerous articles each month from the Summer of 2002 through the Spring of 2003 examining the arguments and evidence for going to war with Iraq. Here is a good example still online that came from the front page of WaPo in the Summer of 2002 that I thought characterized early the difficulty and disagreement in the intelligence community: In Assessing Iraq's Arsenal, The 'Reality Is Uncertainty' (Jul 2002) Another good example from the front page of WaPo as Congress began debate over the authorization to use force is: Debate Over Iraq Focuses on Outcome--Multiple Scenarios Drive Questions About War (Oct 2002) Interestingly, this story was picked up by Jack Shafer at Slate (Pollyanna Pincus) and entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Warner. However, one of my favorite "blame the messenger" blog posts is still: Washington Post's Thomas Ricks Courageously Waits Four Years To Tell Us What He Thought About Iraq's WMD Us American's ain't deep thinkers. Continental philosophy (which even some "normal" people read over there) has discussed the social creation of reality through language for decades: Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, Baudrillard. About the only notable person in the U.S. with a similar interest is Noam Chomsky -- who is mostly known here as the right-wing swear word "noamchomsky!" on the mainstream media.
Posted by: smchris at January 19, 2009 9:07 AM | Permalink "About the only notable person in the U.S. with a similar interest is Noam Chomsky" No not in the least. Like the writer and the readership of this blog -like most Americans- Chomsky wants to imagine himself outside the circle looking in. He divides the world between good guys and bad guys, 'us' and 'them.' But there is no them, the world exists in shades of grey and we're all inside the circle. Chomsky is the original angry nerd. That's the difference between Americans and the Europeans, at least those who consider themselves professional intellectuals. “Doing these cases,” he wrote, “I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended.”He took for granted about his trade -and his profession- what you can't accept about yours. He was more on an intellectual than Hallin or Jay Rosen and he had far more right to take himself seriously. Posted by: seth edenbaum at January 19, 2009 11:27 AM | Permalink Jay, loved the interview with Glenn Greenwald. Best for me was your point that for fear of appearing biased, MSM journalists believe objectivity lies in reporting on ¨whats realistically going to happen.¨ Which can only be divined by consulting those within the power structure. Their Savvy ideology. I immediately pictured the annoying tic that tv media reporters and commentators have, just before they are going to say something savvy: they cock their heads slightly, say, ¨Look--¨ with a brief dramatic pause, and then lay out the real politik. This is a posture not only of our MSM, but also our general culture. I know many colleagues who share with me similar views on political issues, but continue to discount media sources outside of NYT and WaPo, because of their own need to see themselves as having a certain stature within the power structure. Glenn touches upon another aspect of this when he says that people sometimes defend their party leaders even when they act contrary to what they think is right, because what is right lies in the apparent sphere of deviance which is taboo. I worked hard for the Obama campaign, but for me it remains to be seen if he has the leadership qualities I hope for, especially in the context we are speaking of here. While he has certainly reached out to the power structure on all sides, including having dinner with George Will and friends, he is notably keeping at arm's length those who have been placed in the sphere of deviance though they have consistently been proven right (Kucinich, Dean, etc) Posted by: Maria at January 19, 2009 3:15 PM | Permalink Notice how tempting it is to claim property in the "sphere of deviance"? Now it includes Congressman/former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich and DNC Chairman/former presidential candidate & Governor Howard Dean. There's an interesting point made by Russ Baker in this interview (several minutes in): http://www.radioopensource.org/the-bush-mystery-solved-russ-baker/ This reporter was saying that at corporate-owned media outlets, people naturally more worried about controversial stories more easily. Because often the corporate parents of the outfit have other business interests--which may be vulnerable if a story offends the wrong people. At a smaller publication without such interests, no such vulnerabilities exist. Hence, you'd expect the "sphere of deviancy" at these smaller publications to be different than at the larger, corporate owned outfits. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 19, 2009 4:43 PM | Permalink Spheres are NOT Overton. Spheres is about describing the somewhat static reality of the boundries of mainstreamm journalistic discourse. Overton is about a deliberate self-conscious activist method of making change, by pulling the discourse over, by taking the extreme position in order to redefine what is the center Not the same thing at all. Posted by: DrSteveB at January 20, 2009 5:08 AM | Permalink “This just in—from 1986.” Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler didn’t think much of my post. Old news, overly jargonized, not very illuminating, he says.That's part of what Somerby had to say. He also criticized the analysis as incomplete, because it doesn't mention how the press uses dis/misinformation and (often invented) standard stories to promote the conventional wisdom (sphere of consensus) and criticize marginal ideas (sphere of deviance). Posted by: Crust at January 20, 2009 10:36 AM | Permalink Or in other words, Jay, Somerby's core criticism of this post is that you let the press off too easy. The rot goes deeper. Posted by: Crust at January 20, 2009 10:42 AM | Permalink I completely agree: the establishment press should be establishing a sphere of unreliability to the point of being crazy wrong and put into it those who deserve it, Wow, the arrogance of this statement is breathtaking, substitute Republican Party, or Catholic Church for establishment press, and well, I think you catch my drift. No matter how transparent, what you suggest will, no make that is, helping to destroy the legitimacy of the press; especially when the establishment press has done such a good job of placing themselves in the” sphere of unreliability to the point of being crazy wrong” so many times. Don't do it unless you are from time to time willing to place in the sphere of unreliability to the point of being crazy wrong a major party's campaign for president... for example. You're talking about John Kerry right? Or is It Al Gore? Posted by: abad man at January 20, 2009 12:50 PM | Permalink Hillard's chart looked reasonable to me at first, until I considered there is really not a place for whats extreme. The sphere of deviance is far too vague and varied to make sense of the whole. This is a great explainer. To the following: "our political press...its reference group for establishing the “ground” of consensus is the insiders: the professional political class in Washington." ... I would argue that our dominant political press have another reference for establishing the ground of consensus: The ideological milieu in which they live. Where many journalists share proximity and a predominant ideology (or are not often exposed to well-communicated opposing ideologies), I suggest that they suffer a kind of political group-think; a politcal "press-think", if you will. A useful illustration might be the (perhaps apocryphal) quote attributed to former New York Times movie reviewer Pauline Kael, in which she expressed disbelief about Richard Nixon's landslide win in the 1972 Presidential election because she couldn't imagine people voting for him: "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them." Posted by: TRAINED AUDITOR at January 21, 2009 11:26 PM | Permalink The Internet can spark an investigation but does it ever settle one? The web produced the firm belief that the landings on the moon were staged and faked. It is a belief that can gain consensus and then become a permanent cultural carbuncle. In behavioral science, the term "superstitious learning" was once in vogue before the time of web punditry discovering that rebranding old thoughts as new thoughts was a key strategy of amassing a following. Instant thought heroes have become the tip of the long tail and if ever there was a time for the public to step back and question the power of the web to provide critical review of contentious topics, it is now. The web is an amplifier. Full stop. It is the voice at the mic that has to decide to speak or sing competently or scream obscenities. IOW, we have what we had before; it is just louder. Posted by: Len Bullard at January 23, 2009 11:25 AM | Permalink |
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