So we have the “mass amateuriaztion” that Clay Shirky wrote about vis-a-vis the printing press and scribes, only applied to journalism. Marc talks about people committing “acts of journalism,” which I think is fair characterization of amateur reporting . It’s certainly a fairer characterization than the grandiose fantasies heard from the cheerleaders of “citizen journalism.” If you read Jay Rosen, for example, you’d get the impression there are no possible drawbacks to part-time volunteers trying to do the job once done by trained reporters. Moreover, you’d think that any criticism of amateur journalism is always ignorant, reactionary, condescending and/or anti-democratic.

“We live under the happy illusion that we can transfer news-gathering to the Internet.”

Jarvis responds: “Well, he’s right about the happy part. News alerady has come to the internet, where it is faster, more complete, more global, with more voices.”

“Alerady”? “internet” not capitalized? Hey, it’s blogging, don’t expect the cleanest copy!

I’m more concerned with flaws in reasoning: how did Hedges’ pointed “news *gathering*” get blunted into Jarvis’ “news”? Jarvis seems to conflate dissemination with accumulation.

The Internet makes dissemination cheap. But the Internet does not do legwork, the Internet does not conduct and transcribe interviews, the Internet does not check quotes with sources, and as yet there’s no website or search engine (I know of) where I can go and type a question like “have the prices of tires risen in real terms since 2003?” and have some whiz-bang AI go and find the answer for me on the Web in seconds, for free. These tasks take human time, and human time is human money.

Oh, but we can get that labor paid for with website ad revenues, right? After all, media analysts have concluded that 2008 is the first year in which Internet ad spending exceeded spending on more traditional categories like TV, radio, newspapers.

http://tinyurl.com/6ralce

Oops, read on: that’s only true if you include how much companies spend on their own websites — which, it turns out, is about 60% of their spending in the category of “online advertising.” So, really, over a decade after hitting the big time as a medium, the Internet is not pulling its weight as an advertising revenue source for funding news gathering. And those corporate websites soaking up so much of online advertising budgets now — gee, we can expect beaucoup unbiased news reporting from those, I’m sure ….

“OK,” you might say, “maybe at the moment, but Real Soon Now, that’ll change, because internet advertising in Internet news sources features great bang for the buck, right? Isn’t it just a matter of newspapers figuring it out?”

Oops. Sadly, no. It’s a matter of what those who pay the ad bills have figured out.

“Overall, companies will spend 61.8% of their online budgets on their own Web sites, for a total of $65.1 billion. This partly reflects a shortage of online ad inventory, but may also signal dissatisfaction with the advertising and marketing services offered by online publishers.

“Indeed, 75% of advertisers ranked their own Web sites as the most effective means of lead generation (ahead of exhibitions at 66%, custom pubs at 65%, and direct mail and trade magazines, both at 64%).”

It’s fair to say that the trends are in place and pretty solid, by now. News on paper is eventually going to die. News online isn’t going get anything like the same supporting revenue per fact-checked, source-checked, proofread word. (And arguably, most online readers don’t have the attention span for that quality product anyway.) So I see ever fewer ultimate sources of news (including journos who … uh … who take the time to *think* more clearly than the obviously hurried Jeff Jarvis)? because there’s going to ever less money to pay them. Yeah, I can get a wider diversity of people commenting on the results, perhaps. All hail Blogistan and its perpetually warring tribal chieftains! But … don’t they ultimately rely on somebody’s facts for any credibility at all?

As someone (Moynihan) said: we’re all entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts. Absent coolly objective AI over our shoulders, it looks like somebody has to pay for actual facts. Maybe in the end, if present trends continue, you’ll be able to tell the more honest among us by how much more often they answer questions on the major questions of the day with a shrug, saying “Who knows? Not me. And, almost as certainly: not you either.”

Well, you could come up with a definition, but the problem is, hardly anybody would identify with it. And the news media need an audience identity go slant towards. After all, news is a business. Businesses need customers. Quality is what the customer says it is. And we really do have two major groups of customers here:

http://www.themonkeycage.org/econ.soc-thumb.png

I read once that the newspaper business really started declining with the rise of the automobile. Time was, people took public transportation home. Often you were seated with people you didn’t know, passing scenery you’d seen a zillion times. So the afternoon edition of a newspaper, which might have merely rewritten yesterday’s news with a little more depth, and added some comments made by intelligent and/or knowledgeably people, had a natural market, simply by being more interesting than your commute, and in making use of your eyes and brain. You could sell fresh news in the morning, and better-cooked news in the late afternoon.

These days? You can listen to talk radio while stuck in traffic, maybe call in using your cell phone. Yes, driving makes use of your eyes and brain, but at what cognitive level? Chimps have been taught to drive. With enough chimps on the road, we could have a chimp radio channel. Chimps taught to auto-dial on cellphones could call in to those shows as they drove home from whatever jobs chimps might be trained to handle. It would be, as they say, a hoot. (Just don’t give ‘em the vote, please.)

The BBC is awesome and in terms of breadth, depth, objectivity and factuality utterly destroys all U.S.-based TV news.

Still, they are the exception. I browse foreign TV newscasts from time to time, and I’ve yet to encounter any — outside the BBC — that are obviously superior to our networks, PBS and CNN.

On the newspaper front, the NY Times acquits itself very well. Again, the Britons make some bold bids with The Independent, the Guardian and, even, Murdoch’s Times, but none seem to me to be clearly superior to the best American journalism, though surely part of that is just that I’ve grown up with the U.S. style and probably find it more comfortable for that alone.

I try to read translated news from Japan, Iran, China and elsewhere, occasionally and find the quality very, very low compared with the better American newspapers.

It’s a big world, but no one seems to have come up with a better formula of funding or supporting high-quality journalism than the U.S. or, arguably, the U.K. Shouldn’t that tell us to keep our expectations pretty low?

The far bigger problem in America is that the lowest common denominator demographic finds entertainment far more attractive than information and a sizable part of the population makes little or no distinction between the two.

Thus the struggle to make real news profitable.

The quality and quantity of journalism available to me far surpasses my needs. Sure, an awful lot of dirty deeds go unreported and good ones overlooked in the news media, but for me, there’s still far more reported than I can possibly keep up with. I don’t think I’m very different from the average American in that regard.

The political contributions of a network’s EMPLOYEES don’t determine how liberal or conservative the network itself is.

I remember that poll, Woody. Inconveniently for your case, Fox News employees contributions to the Dems outweighed their contributions to the GOP by a margin not wildly different from the ratio at CBS, ABC, NBC ….

So why is Fox so conservative? Because its EXECUTIVES are meeting the echo-chamber demands of its AUDIENCE … just as you’d expect any marketing-savvy company to do.

Why would a Democrat work for FOX? Well … maybe to have a job? Though in the case of the proofreader overseeing their error-laden text crawl, I think that’s gotta be one Democrat who’s got his feet up his desk, sipping a latte, reading the NYT and paying no attention at all … because he realizes that fixing all the typos would be casting pearls before swine anyway.

It is because the right-wing media consists largely of unopposed commentary. So the Woodies of the world listen to talkradio, which is one long a narrow, hyper-partisan rant, then compare that to mainstream newspaper journalism. And on that basis, we can all agree with Woody. If you use talkradio or Fox News Channel as representing the “center” of the political spectrum, then, certainly, the mainstream media worldview falls to the left.

At the end of the day, there is no credible definition of where the political center actually is, so talk about bias is missing the point. That’s why accuracy, rather than fairness or balance, is a far more meaningful measure of media quality.

True enough, but there is an important distinction.

The wingnutosphere constitutes a much bigger percentage of right-wing blogland than does the “leftmoonbatosphere” of left-wing blogland.

The progressive movement has seized on the Internet as an organizing and fund-raising tool. Moveon.org, Media Matters and many others are very much oriented to getting readers involved and active.

And while Huffpo, DailyKos and Eschaton have their share of lefty loonies, there just isn’t the nexus of paranoia/general nuttiness between the hosts and the commentors that you find in places like townhall.com, thedrudgereport and so on.

In the end, the blogosphere will repel wingnuttiness in the same way the mainstream media has: not be snuffing it out, but by relegating it to second- and third-rate status…

Or maybe we could examine the words of James Baker, who, after reviewing the media coverage of his party, summarized “There were days and times and events we might have had some complaints [but] on balance I don’t think we have had anything to complain about.”

And how about the right wing fanatic Pat Buchanan, who found that he could not identify a single instance of alleged liberal bias against him during all of his runs for presidential office: “I’ve gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage – all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the ‘liberal media,’ but every Republican on earth does that.”

But perhaps the most telling quote comes from Noam Chomsky, who sanefully points out that the very fact that we even have such silly arguments about the political tendencies of a corporate dominated media (who themselves often start these silly arguments) is in and of itself proof that there is a right wing bias. A “liberal bias” is a label that any person in the press greatly relishes…so it is basically a favor to CBS, NBC, ABC, NYT, etc. to use the term “liberal”….just as it was a favor for the Republican – controlled Congress in 1996 to give away tens of billions of dollars in welfare monies to the same status quo known as the “liberal biased media.” Sheesh, you dumb ass Republicans have nothing. Your hypocrisy is so funny all one has to do is laugh.

Say what you will about the old dead white guys who wrote the Constitution but they were forward-thinking enough to realize that a free unfettered press– as the web finally provides to just about everyone– provides (among other benefits) a great escape valve for all the tons of hot air both sides’ hacks harrumph out their pieholes.

Just sayin’…

The “ideological echo chambers” is not without its BENEFITS for democracy. It facilities the self-neutering of wing-nuts. Rather than let their petty resentments and bigotry build up, they get a chance to vent it 24/7 and live under the illusion that a general public buys into their inanities.

How many Woodies and GM Ropers have killed off any possibility of running for public office by exposing the unintermediated juvenality on the Internet?

At the moment, the right wingnutosphere is shouting itself down with the mantra that Obama is a Marxist Muslim Manchurian candidate. Meanwhile, the candidate himself is attending church, fending off guilt by association with his CHRISTIAN pastor and meeting with those crypto-Marxist stalwarts Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker and Warren Buffet, to gather advice on economic policy.

Overall, the Internet is a huge plus for journalism, democracy and open society. Where would Obama be without it?

To the extent that the Internet makes it easier for ideologues to drown out any dissenting inner voices, it also makes it harder for the mainstream to suppress dissent and those who seek it out. How isn’t a buyer of that bargain?

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-onthemedia27-2008jul27,0,712999.story

Woody, you’re obviously beyond embarrassment talking about “stating the truth” after the crazy and/or falsified shit you’ve been raining on Marc’s website in recent days.

Plus, the liberal media is getting out its message, as indicated by what is received by the public in this poll:

The Rasmussen Reports poll released Monday showed that nearly half of voters – 49 percent – think reporters are trying to help Obama win the election. Only 14 percent of voters think the media are trying to help Republican candidate John McCain (Ariz.) win the race.

Conservatives aren’t whining when they state the truth.

“I admit it, The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.”