Participatory Democracy

[gagged_Louise]

Democracy, the News and Web 2.0

It's double edged I think. With the web it's become harder to sell a high-profile smear campaign or work only by "strawman arguments" and fear if you wish to reach through to everyone who's literate and interested, and convince them - as when a popular election is in sight. The McCain campaign tried to smear Obama for being un-American, to hint he was a foreigner, maybe a muslim, and a marxist/commie, It failed, because it's no longer a one-way game. Today, Obama doesn't have to answer all those insults and rumours in person or through a staff spokesman, which Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale or Harry Truman would have had to: people who sympathized with him or who were interested in fair play did much of the public (or "kitchen table talk") replying for him, and they didn't even need to get it accepted by a newspaper or a tv channel or spend any big money of their own, only some time. Sometimes all they needed to do was spread the word over a webpage or an e-mail. On the whole, I think it's great that news and media have become a multi-way thing and not just approved stuff going through to the masses.

But the downside of the internet and 24/7 news presence (cable tv news all day, all night) is, it's become pretty much impossible, in economic terms, to run a newspaper or a tv newsdesk on news value and news stories alone - and make it go round.. I mean "old school news", hard news, interviews, informed features and solid reporting here, not infotainment spoundbites or marketing masquerading as news. Because so much of the news output seems to be for free - 95% of the news content of dailies published for free and availiable non-stop if you pay your ISP 15-30 dimes a month, hundreds of tv channels that you get to see on your cable tv deal, and all of this updated in real time - it's become impossible to really charge money for the news you get to read and see. As a newspaper editor or owner, what do you do if you want to make some money and not get totally dependent on ad income? I don't know with certainty about the US, but this is what many newspapers here in Sweden go in for:

-Rewrite the stuff of other newspapers, in the country and abroad, without bothering to check anything or asking 'is this relevant to us?', 'who are these guys speaking for? do they have something they want to sell? an agenda?' Translate every follow-up article on Maddie McCann as long as people read it online and it makes headlines.

-Try to get columnists and bloggers who have a knack for making aggressive and blood-sputtering outbursts, of jumping at that tv show or that athletics hero and writing stuff that will make people roll their eyes. Go for the folks who can be their own news: if you have someone who pulls people in by their manner of writing and a knack for kicking off feuds in public, then you have something that's exclusive to your paper, no matter what their subject is.

-Interview all sort of reality tv stars and wannabes, and make them tell their stories of what they thought when Mickey pissed in the snow or Jane lambasted the girl you're talking to. Make sure they will make threats and talk as if they were born in the Big Brother House. They want to make a career too! Print this only when the episode in questioin is about to air, even if the interview was made months before. Put it on the newsstand headlines.

-Go for news and angles that will create kneejerk reactions, anger, wtf, tears, antipathy to people the readers have never met - what tv people call shoutability. Making people talk about your news is more important than generating any thinking, or even glimpsing any serious news at all down there.

-Cite experts on any subject without checking if they have any kind of credentials for their expertise. If you don't have experts on the subject in question, make your reporters and columnists pose as experts.

-When people start writing to your paper and commenting, or post comments online under the article, always highlight the dumbest and most kneejerk replies: "The people say: "Sentence that reality tv star to two years in prison!"

Recognize any of this from home?

Newspapers have sneakily become less critical and less able to look up news for themselves. The Watergate digging, and the rigorous fact checking they did, over almost two years time, would be hard to imagine in a big paper today. And it's become harder to discuss things in depth I guess. When you get into a debate online, and it starts from a deliberately one-angled blog post or op-ed piece, it often seems to get locked in discussing details after a while. People want to nail the guy on the other side of the aisle with a dodgy detail, wrong numbers, "you don't know history do you?" or just with not sticking to the angle of the OP and discussing that strictly (I have no trouble with one-sided argument pieces but it's good if they can be discussed without getting into personal lampooning, and if the people discussing can see that the original poster may have left things out).

When a blog comment thread runs to 30 or 80 posts, and two or three people are arguing, often their focus becomes to nail the opponent with an error vs something that was said in their last few comment posts of the thread or ten posts before,, so they can say "Ha! I won! You don't know shit!" - and this dilutes any argument about the wider issues. That kind of thing is easier to see through on paper, but online getting a punch that sounds good is more important than getting to the bones of the problem, because few people will read through a long stretch of text alertly online. It wouldn't be an issue if we had more places where you could dicuss things online and keep it on topic, keep it open as a public arena, but that's about a way of handling the open web discussion that we don't really have yet.