Journalism and The Digital Hollows
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 by Patrick RossBoth the House and Senate in recent weeks have held hearings on the future of newspapers, and the fact that the future — and present — for newspapers is bleak is no surprise to readers of this blog. There is of course a larger issue here, and that is the future of journalism. The back-and-forth at these hearings involved free-culture advocates such as a Google executive and Arianna Huffington promoting “citizen” journalism, where a bunch of enthusiastic folks with lots of time on their hands pool resources and somehow, wiki-style, quality emerges. The response was put best by a former Baltimore Sun reporter who said he’d accept this new journalism model the moment he saw a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore city council meeting.*
As a former journalist and spouse of a journalist, I can’t ignore my bias here, and thus I’ll leave the debate over the definition of journalism to others (at least for now — sit down with me over a beer and my reticence will fade). But whether you believe in the traditional, highly successful model of journalism (the one that came to the rescue of poorly treated military personnel at Walter Reed Hospital, for example) or this new, bottom-up approach to holding society’s leaders accountable (oh dear, my bias is creeping in again), we should all be able to agree on these two points:
1. Journalism, however you define it, is indispensable to democracy.
2. Newspapers, at least in the post-yellow journalism period of the last eighty or so years, have led the way in the field of journalism.
If you find those two points false, I wouldn’t bother to keep reading. If you think they hold some merit, read on, and we’ll see if we can find more points of agreement.
Journalism is, I believe, critical to democracy because it provides an avenue for information flow that acts as a check on the worst instincts of all forms of power in society. Prior to England’s Statute of Anne introducing copyright to the country, newspapers needed a license from the Crown to publish. This limited entry into the field and kept publishers wary of losing their license if they criticized the royal family or Parliament. One wonderful benefit of the introduction of copyright is that the previous protection, licensing, was removed. Quickly after 1710 there were numerous new newspapers helping to educate citizens, and existing papers became freer in what they chose to report not just because they could but because they needed to in order to compete. Students of US history will remember that at the time of our revolution, King George III was still calling the shots in England, but the slow decline of the British royals from power to sideshow could not have happened without newspapers.
Journalists, historically through newspapers, have told us not just what we want to learn about — that is, after all, why one subscribes or purchases a single copy — but also things we should know as citizens but wouldn’t necessarily find out. Newspapers by definition try to be all things to all people — that is the blessing and the curse of operating in a mass media world — but in so doing a newspaper provides you in one sitting with a broad perspective on the world, from tonight’s Caps-Penguins Game 7 here in DC to the latest clashes between the Taliban and the Pakistani military in the Swat region.
When we choose our leaders, when we decide what public policy decisions to support or oppose, when we decide to what causes we wish to volunteer our time, we work out of our knowledge base. And journalism helps define that knowledge base. It would seem obvious on its face that we would want that knowledge base to be as expansive as possible. However, Nobel Prize Winner Hebert Simon taught us that there is a limit to how much information is useful, and that in this information age we are forced to pick and choose data in a rational process he called “satisficing.”
But one would think that our knowledge base should at least contain multiple viewpoints based on multiple data sets. Yet it is also rational for us to self-filter our information input, to seek out viewpoints that validate our own prejudgments. Newspapers are accused of being a filter, but they are a useful filter, not seeking to eliminate points of view (I acknowledge just about every newspaper does have some ideological tilt) but instead to filter based on quality.
When we self-filter, which we do in the digital world, we quite naturally do not try to move away from bias as newspapers attempt to do, but toward it. We also are forced to do our own judgments on quality of information, and there we may be inclined to favor sources with which we are familiar. Thus, we sentence ourselves to live in digital hollows, the remote Appalachian valleys where minor dustups become major conflicts due to lack of exposure to outside thought. For more, Google “Hatfield McCoy.”
This Digital Hollows world was evidenced in an odd circumstance that occurred during the recent US presidential campaign. In March of 2008, a Pew poll found about 12% of Americans thought Barack Obama was a Muslim. This was false. The media and the campaign continually shot that down, and a scandal involving Obama’s Christian minister cast further doubt on the thesis. But that summer another poll showed the figure remained at about 12%, balanced across Democrats, Republicans and independents. At that point you could argue that a certain segment of the population simply wasn’t paying attention to the campaign.
On the eve of the election, the latest Pew poll showed the number of Americans thinking Obama was a Muslim had risen to 19%, heavily stacked in favor of Republicans. Those last few months had likely been the most-watched campaign in recent US history. How did the misperception grow?
I believe it was due to our self-filtering system. Those who had no stake in believing Obama to be a Muslim, over time, took in enough of the evidence to the contrary to change their minds. Some, however, actually came to be persuaded to that point of view because they were open to reasons to oppose Obama, and often the falsehood came in the form of an email or phone call from a friend or relative. That source was not personally schooled in the presidential candidate’s religious background, and they were usually just passing on information from someone else who also didn’t know where it came from, but such is the viral world we live in.
This Digital Hollows world is hardly a new concept. MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte first saw evidence of this in the mid 1990s in experiments in using technology to create a custom newspaper based on your interests; he called the phenomenon “The Daily Me.” Fast-forward to the beginning of this decade and the University of Chicago’s Cass Sunstein — now Obama’s regulation czar — said this growing trend could cause irreparable harm to democracy.
Now Sunstein, in his current post, has to be careful that he doesn’t insult the intelligence of the American voter by being too outspoken on this subject. But I, not being an elected official, will suggest that all of us live in digital hollows, and that we moved into them faster and with more aggressiveness than even Negroponte and Sunstein could have anticipated. Neither saw fully how email, SMS, Twitter, RSS, Digg and other technologies — all of which are positive in enabling us to communicate with more efficiency and obtain information easier — can also isolate us.
This brings to mind another Nobel Prize winner, John Nash. His game theory rests on the concept that what seems to be in one’s best interest might not be when all other players are taken into account. We are all overwhelmed with information, as Simon correctly points out; we are facing what some are calling an exoflood of data. It is in our self-interest to use every tool available to help filter that data. But from the perspective of a functioning democracy, having all of us only hear our point of view — half of the US watching Fox News primetime, the other watching MSNBC primetime — we are going to have a very hard time achieving the post-partisanship President Obama vowed to deliver to this town.
I don’t believe there is a single solution. The digital tools we’ve used to build our digital hollows are not the problem. We certainly don’t want to do anything to slow the exaflood. But there are steps we can take.
For one, we can all try a little harder to be exposed to other points of view. Many opponents of existing copyright law read this blog. I don’t see a lot of evidence my arguments have any impact on them, but I applaud them for listening to other points of view. I read many, many blogs opposing my philosophical beliefs on copyright. Sometimes I learn something.
I also try to read multiple newspapers with multiple perceived biases. I read articles I wouldn’t otherwise read to try to expand my knowledge base (Sunstein refers to the loss of this serendipity effect as one of the greatest harms to democracy resulting from self-filtering; filtering by topic precludes learning of other interesting and important things). I read a lot of books and periodicals (one I highly recommend is The Week, which is a fantastic summary of the news and opinion on numerous subjects). I read a number of blogs, although blogs are great for commentary but usually aren’t doing a lot of primary reporting.
And last week I did something that I may start doing more of. A friend of mine mentioned she liked The Washington Post but couldn’t afford a newspaper subscription right now (she’s a student on a tight budget) and was only reading The Washington Examiner, which is free. That’s a good newspaper, but not as robust as the Post (albeit the latter is shrinking in size before my eyes). I purchased her a subscription to the daily Post. Now she can see stories one is covering but not the other, and she can balance the Examiner’s conservative editorial philosophy with the more liberal editorial philosophy of the Post.
Every time I see someone write an obituary for newspapers, they open by saying how much they love newspapers and will miss them. (It reminds me of how most critics of copyright open with a token sentence about how creators’ rights are important.) I am one of those newspaper lovers who can’t deny the industry is in extreme pain. It would seem there are still a lot of us out there, most of us of a certain age with a certain amount of discretionary income.
Let’s say there are 10 million of us, I think most likely a conservative estimate out of a population of 300 million. What if each one of us purchased 10 subscriptions for others, preferably younger people who have not developed a habit of newspaper reading, but really anyone. It could be someone not receiving a newspaper, or it could be like my young friend who now can balance one newspaper with the other. That would be 100 million new newspaper subscriptions. Hopefully Wall Street, which unfortunately newspaper companies hitched their wagons to a few decades ago, would sit up and take notice of that, and we could buy this valuable industry a little more time.
I’d like to hear from readers regarding what you think of my Digital Hollows thesis. Have we truly isolated ourselves? Are we in so deep that thoughtful dialogue on key policy topics is difficult if not impossible? Do newspapers play a role, however small, in arresting our complete decline into these hollows? Is there anything we can do to save newspapers and the journalism they uniquely produce, and which many non-subscribers enjoy every day online?
* Note to readers: While newspapers certainly suffer from copyright infringement, and while I am proud to have major newspapers and their trade association as members of the Copyright Alliance, much of their challenge today is not necessarily related to copyright, so recognize my acknowlgement of that point as you continue to read.
ADDENDUM (May 14, 10:15 ET): This interesting column on PC Magazine’s web site is relevant to this discussion; Lance Ulanoff argues the free model for news and video is largely unsustainable, and predicts micropayments and other solutions will turn the Internet into a more conventional marketplace. Note that, for now, we can read his column for free online, in theory supported by the ads around it (I think there were ads, my brain has trained itself not to see them and click through them).
