William Greider: All the King's Media

[merkins]

William Greider, excellent as always...

George W. Bush's plight leads me to thoughts of Louis XV and his royal court in the eighteenth century. Politics may not have changed as much as modern pretensions assume. Like Bush, the French king was quite popular until he was scorned, stubbornly self-certain in his exercise of power yet strangely submissive to manipulation by his courtiers. Like Louis Quinze, our American magistrate (whose own position was secured through court intrigues, not elections) has lost the "royal touch." Certain influential cliques openly jeer the leader they not so long ago extolled; others gossip about royal tantrums and other symptoms of lost direction. The accusations stalking his important counselors and assembly leaders might even send some of them to jail. These political upsets might matter less if the government were not so inept at fulfilling its routine obligations, like storm relief. The king's sorry war drags on without resolution, with people still arguing over why exactly he started it. The staff of life--oil, not bread--has become punishingly expensive. The government is broke, borrowing formidable sums from rival nations. The king pretends nothing has changed.

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Heroic truth-tellers in the Watergate saga, the established media are now in disrepute, scandalized by unreliable "news" and over-intimate attachments to powerful court insiders. The major media stood too close to the throne, deferred too eagerly to the king's twisted version of reality and his lust for war. The institutions of "news" failed democracy on monumental matters. In fact, the contemporary system looks a lot more like the ancien régime than its practitioners realize. Control is top-down and centralized. Information is shaped (and tainted) by the proximity of leading news-gatherers to the royal court and by their great distance from people and ordinary experience.

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The elite press, like any narcissistic politician, tells a heart-warming myth about itself. Reporters, it is said, dig out the hard facts to share with the people by locating anonymous truth-tellers inside government. They then protect these sources from retaliation by refusing to name them, even at the cost of going to prison. That story line was utterly smashed by this scandal. Reporters were prepared to go to jail to protect sources who were not exactly whistleblowers cowering in anonymity. They were Libby and Karl Rove--the king's own counselors at the pinnacle of government. They were the same guys who collaborated on the bloodiest political deception of the Bush presidency: the lies that took the country into war. So, in a sense, the press was also protecting itself from further embarrassment. The major media, including the best newspapers, all got the war wrong, and for roughly the same reason--their compliant proximity to power. With a few honorable exceptions, they bought into the lies and led cheers for war. They ignored or downplayed the dissent from some military leaders and declined to explore tough questions posed by anyone outside the charmed circle. The nation may not soon forget this abuse of privileged status, nor should it.

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For the faltering press, the bloggers will keep sharpening their swords, slicing away at the established order. This is good, but the pressure will lead to meaningful change only if the Internet artisans innovate further, organizing new formats and techniques for networking among more diverse people and interests. The daily feed of facts and bile from bloggers has been wondrously effective in unmasking the pretensions of the big boys, but the broader society needs more--something closer to the democratic "conversations and seminars" that Gillmor envisions, and less dependent on partisan fury and accusation. As an ex-Luddite, I came to the web with the skepticism of an old print guy. Against expectations, I am experiencing sustained exchanges with many far-flung people I've never met--dialogues that inform both of us and are utterly voluntary experiences. This is a promising new form of consent. Democracy, I once wrote, begins not at election time but in human conversation.


more:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1104-30.htm

[Cha]

1. Fascinating reading by

William Greider, "the ol' ex Luddite"!

"Something similar, as Darnton noted, is occurring now in American society. The centralized institutions of press and broadcasting are being challenged and steadily eroded by widening circles of unlicensed "news" agents--from talk-radio hosts to Internet bloggers and others--who compete with the official press to be believed. These interlopers speak in a different language and from many different angles of vision. Less authoritative, but more democratic. The upheaval has only just begun, but already even the best newspapers are hemorrhaging circulation. Dan Gillmor, an influential pioneer and author of We the Media, thinks tomorrow's news, the reporting and production, will be "more of a conversation, or a seminar"--less top-down, and closer to how people really speak about their lives."

[missouri dem 2]

2. A bit more;

What will come of all this? Possibly, not much. The cluster of scandals and breakdown may simply feed the people's alienation and resignation. The governing elites, including major media, are in denial, unwilling to speak honestly about the perilous economic circumstances ahead, the burgeoning debt from global trade, the sinking of the working class and other threatening conditions. When those realities surface, many American lives will be upended with no available recourse and no one in authority they can trust, since the denial and evasion are bipartisan. That's a very dangerous situation for a society--an invitation to irrational angers and scapegoating. It will require a new, more encompassing politics to avert an ugly political contagion. We need more reliable "news" to recover democracy.

[LibertyorDeath]

3. Excellent synopsis of the boy king & his court of jesters

[OneBlueSky]

4. Greider insightful as always . . . ever a good read . . . n/t

.

[bemildred]

5. The net has one advantage/disadvantage: it is unfiltered.

You can read all points of view and make up your own mind,
if you have the time and energy for it. There is a business
opportunity out there for someone who does the semantic filtering
without filtering out anything. That would be something like Google
News without any of the redundancy.