The modern MSM has been corporatised to the point where its content is market research led - sometimes research into what its readers want to read, but increasingly, what its advertisers will help fund.
Genuine investigative reporting is not only very expensive, it is politically fraught, and commercially unviable in this context. It happens now only when whistleblowers take the risk and provide the data, when academics or other independents do the hard work, or when what is being uncovered suit the political agenda of the proprietor - ref. Commons expenses scandal.
The Financial Times isn't about "changing behaviour" corporate or otherwise. Local scandals are pursued because they threaten larger interests. The business class isn't about a homogenous set of interests, but lots of competing self-interests, and if facts can be uncovered which damage competing interests, then well and good. It lends a veneer of objectivity to the whole process if some things are criticised some of the time.
But we are all increasingly selective in the facts we use simply because they are so many out there, and it is not the business of the MSM to "trickle down" inconvenient facts if they damage the interests of the business class as a whole. Even now the storyline is "the worst is over", "markets are up", "it's time to buy, buy buy". Until the next Crash.
In Europe the blogosphere is still pretty marginal to this whole process. It encourages a more critical reading of the MSM, but rarely originates much new material of its own.
In Ireland the Institutional Child Sexual abuse scandal was largely popularised by Mary Raftery, an Irish Times journalist who produced the TV documentary "States of Fear," and wrote a book on the same subject, "Suffer The Little Children." If I recall, the TV documentary was first broadcast by the BBC (not an Irish Broadcaster), and the Irish Times is of Protestant origins (and run by an independent, liberal, but pro-secular establishment non-profit trust) and has no difficulty with facts which portray the Catholic Church in a poor light.
So yes, Journalists can perform a very powerful public service, but only if they can ally themselves to powerful institutions with contrary interests. See http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/abuse-in-ireland-one-victim-responds/ notes from no w here
So yes, Journalists can perform a very powerful public service, but only if they can ally themselves to powerful institutions with contrary interests.
You appear to have bought into the notion that the fourth estate forms a pillar of a modern democracy, and of course, at its best, it can.
It wasn't always this way... You can't be me, I'm taken
On the issue of rising inequality mentioned by Jerome, the authors of "The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better" have been doing a decent job of getting the word out in the media.
The book is selling pretty well it seems:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spirit-Level-Societies-Almost-Always/dp/1846140390
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9781846140396/The-Spirit-Level
I always say that I do a good paint job. If you were buying a new car and the paint job was blemished, it would cause you to suspect quality elsewhere - even though the paint job has no bearing on the engineering quality.
It is not often I get the chance to have my full say on strategy with clients, because marketing, like consciousness, is after the fact. But I've been hammering on about corporate honesty for several years now, and finally am getting some enthusiastic nods round the table. You can't be me, I'm taken
"The most important thing in life is sincerity. When you can fake that you've got it made.... --George Burns notes from no w here
don't address it! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
But that in no way undercuts Jerome's point: that an informed polity requires a dedicated system for aggregating and disseminating information ("news").
The blogosphere has not superseded the MSM in this function; rather, major parts of the blogosphere are built on top of its product.
So until the blogiverse is capable of performing this function systematically, I have to agree with Jerome:
we need the facts to be able to fight these. And while blog reporters are doing an increasingly important job, we'll still have to rely on journalists and newspapers to a large extent to get these.
At this point in time, many readers and writers (or internet "users" especially) are trained to apprehend the quality of information primarily by it's quantity, for example...
So you're suggesting IndyMedia "impact" is low or weak, because the share of IndyMedia readers is low among all "converted" readers which is a subset of all readers? That is an extraordinary claim. To what other "alternative news agency" does one compare IndyMedia exposure? I hope not Technocrati or Digg clients' sitemeter counters --confirming the overwhelming tendancy of blog operators to reproduce MSM stories.
On the other hand, are you saying "market penetration" measures the number of reporters (and "stringers") assigned to a particular geographic market? If so, my understanding is that the Independent Media Center (IndyMedia) franchise operates regional servers worldwide to collect and broadcast news files submitted by volunteer reporters, commentators, and translators. Could one reasonably argue "low impact," or thin coverage of local, regional, worldwide events if the total numbers of volunteers is unknown? Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
this needs to be said more often. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Genuine investigative reporting is not only very expensive, it is politically fraught, and commercially unviable in this context. I
Le Canard Enchainé proves the opposite. They have no advertising, are consistently profitable, and have brought down at least one president and countless ministers and other powerful figures (for instance, they broke Papon's role during WWII, eventually leading to his sentence for war crimes almost 20 years later - he was minister of budget at the time) In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
It happens now only when whistleblowers take the risk and provide the data, when academics or other independents do the hard work, or when what is being uncovered suit the political agenda of the proprietor - ref. Commons expenses scandal.
And they do print their own investigations, and just the fact of keeping some embarrassing stories in full view is a vital one. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
The Washington Post did the Watergate expose and seems to have been living off (and living down) that coup ever since.. The current "States of Play" thriller (which I haven't seen) is all about heroic journalist who breaks big story against mega corporate interests. But how often does this really happen? The commercial reality is that celebrity rags do better, and it is so much easier and cheaper to overlay the press releases with some op-ed to provide the veneer of critical objectivity. notes from no w here
They've been behind most of the major scandals in France over the past 40 years. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
They've been behind most of the major scandals in France over the past 40 years.
Presumably you mean they have exposed them rather than been behind them! notes from no w here
I don't know enough about Le Canard Enchainé's business model to comment on the accuracy of your comment, but even if you are correct, is it not the exception that proves the rule?
You could also argue that it proves that when broadcast media play to their strengths, it works.
The fact that most broadcast media fail to do so is no more an indictment of the media platforms in and of themselves than the election of Václav Klaus is an indictment of representative democracy as a whole.
Looking at the politics that I have been most involved in, Internet surveilliance vs Internet freedom in Sweden, the evolving pattern is that pretty much all the new material is produced online by non-journalists. On a particular issue - the FRA-law, the swedish implementation of IPRED, the parliamentary treatment of the telecom package, the ACTA negotiations - there is usually a group of bloggers that does the digging in particular sub-questions (in collaboration with their commenters), a wiki to collect and sort the data and some form of campaign site to formulate the slogans, press-releases and coordinate activities. And a facebook-group tied to the campaign page to draw traffic and utilise the networking effects of that site.
In general I would agree with the quoted bit, but there are examples to show that it need not be so. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
That's where bloggers have the advantage: If the primary source is on the 'net, there is nothing that a reporter can do that a good blogger can't also do.
On the other hand, blogs do not (yet) have reporters on the ground in - say - Georgia, to tell which way the tanks are actually driving, and which city the rocket artillery is actually shooting at. Good as the deconstructions of the official Western(TM) line was (and I note that I got the deconstruction on ET before the Danish press started reporting on the events plagiarising CNN), it would not have been possible without AFP and TASS...
People who live in an area will do their own reporting. We saw that with Katrina and Iraq, and the information, detail and interest level were usually much better than the MSM reporting.
Talking to camera isn't hard. Viewers don't care if it looks amateurish, as long as the coverage is interesting. And there's a generation growing up now which is YouTube literate, and doesn't see MSM TV as an exclusive 'serious' news source.
So single viewpoint editorialised reporting will start to become more rare, replaced by self-selected eyewitness footage and perhaps some random analysis from opionated people.
If you look at BBC News 24, there's only about four hours of real content there each day - the rest of it is autocue reading and repetition. It's starting to look very rigid and contrived as a format. (Which it always has been - but without competition, no one noticed.)
It's possible as blogging becomes more visible reporters won't be needed - or will only be needed in very hard to reach areas.
That depends. If they continue to play to their weaknesses (political analysis tea leaf reading, recycled press releases, manufactured stories, incessant (and unattributed!) plagiarism - sorry, "syndication" and copy-pasted Reuters newsfeeds) instead of playing to their strengths (access to institutions, the ability to dispatch correspondents worldwide on short notice, large and varied archives(!) and the ability to force confrontations with insiders), then they will lose relevance, influence and, not to put too fine a point upon it, raison d'etre.
But if they play to their strengths instead of their weaknesses, they will play an important part of the media landscape throughout this iteration of democracy.
the ability to force confrontations with insiders
And for that matter, you can add providing an institutional framework for whistleblowing. While whistleblowers could hypothetically contact - say - DailyKos, the blogosphere has precious little history of dealing with whistleblowers, and it just takes one security cock-up to make life really miserable for a guy who takes on - say - Volkswagen or ThyssenKrupp.
The really sad thing is that the broadcast media have already largely surrendered two of these critical strengths. If the entire press goes "ooh, shiny!" whenever a spin doctor feeds a press release to a tame newsie, its ability to keep its eyes on the ball long enough to support whistleblowers and force confrontations with insiders is seriously compromised (to put it nicely...). And the salient point here is that blogs and other grassroot media can't - at least in their present form - replace those aspects of the broadcast media.
More exotic places don't necessarily have convenient infrastructure - yet.
The idea of blogging is relatively new, and the idea of news blogging is even newer. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it's not possible.
And I'm not completely convinced by the whistleblower points. Hasn't Wikileaks been doing exactly this?
The move to blogging doesn't just mean a move away from one-to-many media - it means a move away from passive spoonfeeding of editorial narratives, and of the idea of the Inherent Personal Authority of reportage and editorial.
That's a good thing, because a multiplicity of independent sources improves the overall quality of news reporting.
It's a bad thing if you want to make a policy point and have people support you, because first you have to find an audience, and then you have to keep their attention for long enough to create democratic pressure - all of which will become harder.
But it can be done. At the moment the European right is doing it more successfully than the left is. The left is leading in the US.
But that only proves that it can be effective.
