In the face of dwindling newspaper readership, and increasing suspicion that media organizations don't care about the people, blogs can stimulate public discourse.
In a 2005 article entitled “An Open Letter to Journalism School Grads,” mediabistro’s Greg Lindsay addresses whether J-school students should play up to the establishment in order to land a job, or instead “subvert the status quo” by taking alternative routes, like blogging or creating their own websites, to get their voices heard.
His question is even more relevant today. This last August, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press reported that people who get their news mainly from the Internet were more skeptical than ever of traditional news sources. More than two-thirds of those who get their news primarily from the Net believe that news organizations “do not care about the people they report on,” and less than a third believe those organizations get their facts straight. The number who believe news organizations protect democracy has fallen 10 percentage points since 1985, down to 44 percent today.
Not surprisingly, newspaper readership continues to slide, while the number of blogs are skyrocketing. According to the blog tracking site Technorati, there are now nearly 109 million blogs on the Internet, more than double last year’s number, with 175,000 new blogs added every day.
Surely these trends, at least in part, have something to do with people getting tired of having their news spoon fed to them by media conglomerates who can hardly pretend disinterest. The dichotomy Lindsay mentions between mainstream and emerging media isn’t just a matter of career options. It’s one of message and social potential. As the mainstream media pie is increasingly divided among an ever-narrower enclave of empires and principalities, Internet diversity has added a vital counterpart to corporate atherosclerosis.
Blogging is democracy run wild. Some say run amok. The Internet provides a cheap, easy soapbox for everyone with access to a computer and modem. Unfortunately, along with this democratization of the new media comes a perception of lowering standards. Without editors to double-check postings, bloggers have an almost infinite freedom to bungle the facts. While readers can post comments to correct, clarify or complain about a post, those exchanges can devolve into little more than cyber bitch-sessions.
But one of the most important aspects of blogs has less to do with fact than it does opinion: bloggers help keep the public debate alive. As Victor Navasky has suggested, as important as it is to present accurate data, it’s just as crucial to ask the right questions by engaging in “rigorous and vigorous policy debate and moral argument” (“Objectivity is Highly Overrated,” April 24, 2005, Los Angeles Times). And though debates among bloggers may not be as rigorous as we’d like, they’re certainly among the more vigorous.
Increased participation from the public in the media – as shaky as it is sometimes – just might help keep the media more honest, and pointed in the right direction. And that, in turn, might help raise its reputation out of the gutter.
