Blogging won't change the (media) world

Given that I was labeled as the family "commentator" as a child, and that I love to comment on things, especially macro-sociological and larger philosophical questions and issues, it is strange that it's taken me so long to start blogging. Blogging seems perfectly suited to this sort of approach to life.I guess you could say that somehow I never carved out the time for it, or spent my time in other ways (at the moment the biggest draw on my time is my two very young children).

A deep skepticism about the power of bottom-up human social organization is probably another reason it's taken me awhile to get around to blogging. As far as I'm concerned, large, top-down political, economic, and social institutions, and the privileged elite who run them, basically dictate the shape of society.In the realm of news media, for example, large producers such as The New York Times, ABC News, CNN and so on -- still hold the balance of power despite the rise of blogging or what Dan Gillmor has labeled a "We, the media" movement. Yeah, so I can blog now -- but no one's going to read what I write, while millions will continue to surf to CNN.com, foxnews.com, and so on.

OK, so a relatively few people have made it big blogging -- and blogging has, on the whole, affected the way traditional news media cover the news. But it hasn't been a revolution. I can challenge Thomas Friedman's free-market, individualist ideology all I want in this blog (and I will!). But, in all likelihood, no one will read my critiques, certainly not Friedman himself, and other nationally syndicated columnists and pundits such as David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, and so on (all of whom I will challenge in this blog at some point). They will all continue on in blissful ignorance of criticisms of their views.

Is there a cushier job on the face of the planet than (inter)nationally syndicated columnist or broadcast media pundit? You write a few columns a week, appear on this talk show or that, have the opportunity to voice your views to millions, and rarely if ever reflect upon the extreme privilege and comparative power you hold. I don't mean power in the sense that media pundits and columnists will mold readers views as if they are a bunch of ideological sponges (Does Bill O'Reilly really think he's EVER convinced anyone of anything other than the minions who are already in his choir?). I mean power in the sense that your take on the world, politics, culture, the U.S. is far more widely circulated than those of an individual media consumer, who very well may be incensed by your views -- and may well be able to easily deconstruct your "logic".

If a reader of a widely published columnist challenges that columnist, if they are lucky, he or she will be reduced to 250-word letters to the editor. More than likely, they'll never have their letter to the editor published. Some will be relegated to cyberspace, forced to post responses on bulletin boards read by comparatively few people (I wonder how many Denver Post reporters actually troll the newspaper's bulletin boards and blogs, for example, or if columnists such as David Harsanyi -- whose elitist libertarian columns -- yes, on a macro-level, libertarians are elitists -- they presume that their opponents are idiots for not seeing the world the way that they do; in short, they assume that their views are better than others -- do), or banished to the black hole of the blogosphere, where no one will read their response -- though their response may well be more sophisticated and represent better thinking than that of the columnist whom they are challenging.

Sure would be nice to see news media columnists and pundits occasionally acknowledge their tremendous and unusual power and privilege explicitly, rather than what one usually sees, which is, if they acknowledge readers and viewers at all in their columns, they do so in order to belittle their views (see Bill O'Reilly's mailbox, for example -- though certainly he is not at all the only media pundit/columnist to wield his power in this way). Usually, they do so by selectively culling material from mail they receive, and framing it in a context that suits their own rhetorical ends.

Though I can't, and won't, claim to have the definitive view on the relationship between news media producers and consumers, it seems to me that much of the anger and frustration with the traditional "mainstream" (and powerful) media and its various elite does not come from a sense of media "bias." Admittedly there are plenty such charges levied against the mainstream media, which, of course, is, and always will be "biased" -- biased toward a centrist politics and ideology that is deceivingly cast as the "objective".

It's worth emphasizing that at a certain level all stories about the social world, indeed, the natural world, are "biased." They always reflect particular human, social, cultural, theoretical and political perspectives on "reality." One need not look far for confirmation that the notion of a "pure objectivity," a notion which typically embeds itself in the general term "objective," is a mirage. Compare news coverage of the same events, say the Iraq war, in the U.S., in Canada, in Germany, in Iran, in India, and you'll immediately see that ALL news, yes, even "objective" news from the U.S., reflects a national "bias." The documentary Control Room clearly illustrates this basic fact while occasionally underscoring the arrogance of American journalists who claim to be objective (but then laugh, clap, and cheer wildly as the first images of U.S. troops entering Baghdad are shown at CENTCOM).

I will return to deconstructing "objectivity" in another post. Here I'll contend that much of the frustration and anger with the mainstream media in the U.S. comes from the up-until-very-recently almost exclusively one-way flow of news -- from the powerful producer, to the largely powerless (though not passive) news consumer. This sense of frustration is, in my view, justified. For it is human social nature to want to have an opportunity to challenge -- in the same context and from within the same position of power as the original person(s) advancing a view, ideology, etc. -- perspectives that clash with one's own.

Seems to me that news media professionals of all types ought to acknowledge the reality and legitimacy of such frustration more explicitly and more often. In other words, they need to acquire more humility than many now have. (Indeed, this is something I teach my news writing and reporting students at the University of Denver. As a former journalist with eight years in print media, I'll never forget some of the paternalistic and patronizing attitudes I saw among some of my fellow journalists.)

Yes, the advent of the Internet, blogs, discussion boards, e-mail, and so on has altered the news mediascape -- somewhat. But so far, it has not at all been a radical transformation. As far as I can tell, the one-to-many, the one-talking-down-to-the-masses, or, in the case of self-appointed purveyors of reality like Fox's Bill O'Reilly, the shouting-down-those-with-whom-you-disagree-because-you-aren't-smart-enough-to-engage-their-arguments-intellectually style of news media production and consumption still dominates.

Yet despite the fact that the current climate is still one dominated by the few and predicated largely on a one-down-to-many model of transmission, for some strange reason, I have chosen to start blogging. Perhaps this isn't surprising given my general fixation with the paradox that is the relation between individual and society, or with the ways in which the individual can at once be seen as both helpless and hapless and as contributing to the very forms of directed social action that reinforce, and, yes, occasionally, mitigate (though only slightly) this helplessness and haplessness.