Last week’s episode of The Philosopher’s Zone was titled, “The Epistemology of Blogging.” Alan Saunders discussed blogging’s impact on the development and dissemination of knowledge in society with two speakers, Rutgers University’s Alvin Goldman and the University of Tasmania’s David Cody.
Professor Goldman argued that, to the degree to which blogging hastens the demise of the traditional media, investigative journalism will suffer. In addition, the blogosphere lacks the traditional media’s gatekeepers, who work tirelessly to ensure that the information we get from outlets such as The New York Times, Time Magazine, CNN, and Fox News is only of the highest quality. Professor Goldman is concerned that blogging enables consumers to self-select unfiltered information that merely confirms their biases. This could lead to less informed voters, which could end up harming the democratic process.
Professor Goldman obviously has a much higher opinion of the traditional media and of the democratic process than I do.
David Cody, on the other hand, took the glass-half-full perspective on blogging, suggesting that the democratic process doesn’t need gatekeepers in the first place, and that blogs offer some healthy competition to the world of news and information. He drew a parallel between modern arguments against blogging to the arguments made against the printing press in the 15th century. It seems that Johannes Gutenberg took some flak from the established information gatekeepers of his day, too.
Obviously Mr. Cody’s viewpoint more closely reflects my own.
As I listened to the podcast, though, I was struck by Professor Goldman’s implication that the traditional media actually provide the range of perspectives that he believes is so important to the body politic. As a libertarian, the idea that consuming information provided by the major news outlets would lead to a more informed, unbiased populace is laughable. I can probably count on one hand the number of times that a pro-liberty perspective has ever been presented by the mainstream media. Instead, all we ever get is a comparison and contrast of two marginally different big-government approaches to any given issue, and at no point is a serious critique of the role of government ever allowed to enter into the conversation. If it weren’t for the advent of blogs and other non-traditional media outlets, these more fundamental questions might never be considered at all.
This idea stayed with me all week as I listened to and read the traditional news media. For example, The Dallas Morning News ran a story about how parents are left to decide when their children are old enough to stay at home alone. To quote the article, “Laws govern when children can drive, vote, drink, even quit school. But in Texas, there’s no limit on the age when a child can stay home alone.” What primitives we Texans must be! How can we possibly be expected to handle the pressures of parenthood if the state government doesn’t even tell us when our children are old enough to be left alone? I suppose next we’ll be expected to make our own decisions about what our kids can eat or what clothes they can wear. When, oh when, will the madness stop?
Not to be outdone, NPR threw its hat into the ring this week to compete for the honor of the most idiotic piece of journalism with a story on how the poor American dairy farmer is suffering from the low prices paid for milk these days. At no point in an almost thirteen-minute piece covering the price of dairy products did the reporter, John Burnett, manage to mention the myriad government subsidies and price supports that have controlled the dairy industry since 1937. Instead, all we heard was whining about the “free market” and (of course) “too little government oversight.” I understand that journalists can’t know everything about everything, but how is it possible to know nothing about anything?
And then there’s health “reform.” As far as I can tell, all of the traditional media outlets – no matter what their supposed political biases may be – use the term “reform” when covering President Obama’s efforts to nationalize the health care and insurance industries. Of course, the word “reform” means “to improve through alteration.” This is a normative statement that begs the question, and it has no business being mentioned by allegedly objective journalists in their discussion of the issue.
With stories like these shot through the traditional media outlets, it’s hard to take Professor Goldman’s concerns too seriously. If this is the kind of service that the traditional media’s vaunted “gatekeepers” provide, we’re probably all better off just reading unfiltered blogs (like this one).
