Old Media — are they dead yet?
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Hugh Hewitt, whose blog is a must-read in the conservative blogosphere, wrote an article in “Weekly Standard” that seems to be something of a death knell for the mainstream media. After spending a week at the once-hallowed Columbia School of Journalism with a lot of sincere and earnest people who seem to have no idea why journalists have fallen so low in the public’s estimation, Hewitt declares them all certifiably dead:
“…Pulitzer’s world, even Nicholas Lemann’s world of the Harvard Crimson from 1972 to 1976 — they are all gone. Every conversation with one of the old guard citing the old proof texts comes down to this point: There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer. In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess. Authority has drained from journalism for a reason. Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs.”
Is he right? I suppose I just don’t know. Reading the article, it’s hard to miss the fact that there is a systemic blindness in journalistic circles. They are obviously trying to find some kind of band-aid that will convince them that they’ve doctored this gaping wound and that the bleeding will stop soon. The professor Hewitt spends time with is attempting an overhaul of CBJ with an idea that teaching future journalists better research and data analysis skills will surely bridge the gap between those that interview and those that are interviewed.It would all be sweet if it wasn’t so dumb. I’ve never thought that journalists as a bunch weren’t smart enough — just that they are selective in their intelligence. Consider the experience “First Things” writer Richard John Neuhas had with a journalist from a national newspaper:
He’s doing a story on Pope Benedict’s new encyclical. In the course of discussing the pontificate, I referred to the pope as the bishop of Rome. “That raises an interesting point,” he said. “Is it unusual that this pope is also the bishop of Rome?” He obviously thought he was on to a new angle. Once again, I tried to be gentle. Toward the end of our talk, he said with manifest sincerity, “My job is not only to get the story right but to explain what it means.” Ah yes, he is just the fellow to explain what this pontificate and the encyclical really mean. It is poignant.
I don’t fault the MSM because I think they’re stupid. I fault them because I know they’re not, but they don’t care enough to learn or even acknowledge their own lack of knowledge. I fault them because they want so very much to still be the sole distributors of information that they fail to notice the myriad viable sources of accurate and timely news, making them seem like people who long for rotary-dial phones because they just bought stock in them. And I am troubled that as time passes and their obvious bias grows ever more self-evident, their only answer seems to wave their hands in greater and greater circles and tell us all that they’ve got the situation under control so we can ignore that man behind the curtain.
But — returning to Hewitt’s death certificate — I’m not buying funereal wear yet. The news media may have a big problem, but I still don’t believe it can kill them unless they let it. If they can let go of the great lie of disinterested objectivity, we can all figure out what happens next. On the other hand, if they persist in believing that they alone in this empassioned, super-politicized and perverse generation are able to judge without prejudice, Hewitt is right and gets credit for being the first to say it: they’re irrelevant and as good as dead.
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