Georgie Anne Geyer writes the most incredible business model for newspapers I’ve seen yet. She argues, to sum it up, that newspapers prevent wars. And apparently, blogs cause them. If editors were only able to still forcefeed us with what they think is important, she argues, the world would be a peachy place.
My theory is that we Americans have so picked and chosen our news that we have lost that comprehensive view of the world that only a newspaper gives. You may only read a few stories thoroughly, but you are inexorably exposed to ones you don’t choose — labor news in Detroit, deaths in Darfur, economic successes in Finland, a zoning excess in your own community.Whether you like it or not, all of those headlines and leads stay with you; they wash around your head and force you to be a bigger person than you are — and to know and react to a world bigger than you are.
Think for a moment of what might have happened had we had better (really, any) coverage of Afghanistan during the 1990s, when the Taliban and Osama bin Laden were cooking up a second attack after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Could we then have been so amazed by 9/11? Wasn’t it criminally irresponsible to be so amazed?
Think a little further. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world — the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week — it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people.
What a load of claptrap, what incredible hubris, what foot-dragging stupidity, what an insult to a democracy. And what a good laugh.
‘Criminally irresponsible to be so amazed?’
Want to talk criminal? Someone should be in prison for letting this woman near a keyboard.
I agree with Ms. Geyer and disagree with the host. I don’t blame blogs for the Iraqi War, but the fact is that Americans are hopelessly ill-informed about the rest of the world, and proud if their stupidity. If we had been better informed about U.S. policy in the Middle East and its results, the hatreds that lead to 9/11 would not have been a surprise to so many people.
We have a poor excuse for a democracy, when someone can win more votes for president than anyone else and still not be elected to the position. That is not a democracy. In fact, the question is whether we are ready for self-governments. I say, it is too early to tell.
max, r u sirius? the whole popular vote vs. electoral college thing was so 2000. your position changed in 2004 when Judge Smails almost won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote. I guess u didn’t get your paper that day.
Max Edison agrees with Ms. Geyer and states “If we had been better informed about U.S. policy in the Middle East and its results, the hatreds that lead to 9/11 would not have been a surprise to so many people.”
So, if we didn’t have bloggers in the 90’s mucking up our collective brains, where was the MSM in providing this knowledge that would have made us better aware and prepared? I’ll tell you where – hanging around D.C. waiting for press releases, sound bites, and marching orders from their PC commanders. Objective, unbiased investigative and research based reporting is pretty much non-existent in the MSM.
99% of the blogosphere may be crap, but at least we have the opportunity to find the 1% that can convey relevant information. That’s 1% more than the MSM has.
I’m not sure which newspapers Ms. Geyer is referring to, because the ones I used to read don’t offer anything near the world-perspective offered by the blogosphere and social news sites like NowPublic, Reddit, or Memeorandum.
In a world where big media is essentially owned by a half dozen multinational conglomerates…how the hell can we expect to get the full story from them? There is an inherent conflict of interest between good journalism and good business. It’s safe to say the media respects it duty to shareholders over its duty to inform.
If entertainment sells more, they entertain. I’ve seen more lazy journalism over the last few years than ever before in my life. The media adopts the government’s slogans and catch-phrases, they have military and ex-military on staff as “experts,” and they perpetuate the idea that fair and balanced equals presenting 2 (out of MANY) sides and not taking a stand.
Give me a break. Journalism is alive and thriving in the blogosphere, and it’s wearing a suit and (censored) tie in the Big Media. The worst thing that could happen to democracy is the Internet becoming an extension of the mainstream news, which one is unavoidably surrounded by anyway.
Think for a moment of what might have happened had we had better (really, any) coverage of Afghanistan during the 1990s, when the Taliban and Osama bin Laden were cooking up a second attack after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
And whose fault is it, Georgie, if not your employers, for abdicating international coverage to get all breathless over OJ and all the other Hollywood-driven drivel they covered instead? That’s OUR fault? That you and your bosses dropped the proverbial ball?
Calm down, Mr Jarvis, calm down. Your heart….
Oh sure, if the MSM had been in Afghanistan during that time, there is little doubt the OBL would have told them all about his plans. Or maybe disgruntled al Queda insiders, unhappy over some slight or other, would have leaked the details to the NYT. And I’m sure that the would have been features in the Sunday Parade Magazine all about how the terrorist training camps were giving the disadvantaged Afghan youth a sense of purpose and direction.
Sheesh.
The underlying presumption of Ms. Geyer’s commentary is that the media provide a comprehensive, unbiased and informed view of world events.
They do not. To the contrary, they provide an increasily narrow, biased, ignorant view of world events.
Hence the rise of bloggers to fill the gaps.
Ms. Geyer’s expressed views are a perfect example of why she and her colleagues in the MSM are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Jeff, when I read Geyer’s article, I just had to post about it. If what she’s trying to say is that people ought to search for the most important and relevant news, she’s right. If, however, she is saying that civilians are worse off for switching to sources other than printed newspapers, I utterly disagree.
Normally don’t respond to these things but felt compelled to comment on this one:
Newspapers are out to sell papers, much like the evening news, as a result, many news orgainizations sensationalize much of what they report to drive readership. Papers may also be influenced by political lines and/or corporate directive, so in essence you may get the story the news source/reporter wants to you to have; not necessarily the whole truth.
The beauty with the internet is that it allows one to choose stories of interest, but you can also check facts; i.e., determine if the article published or story reported (online or in print) was acurate or just a one-sided view. The beauty with blogs is that they’re a forum for opinion, like this one, which may be based on fact or fiction, but I’m free to post it. And if you’re reading this, take it with a grain of salt… it’s an opinion!
In case Ms. Geyer didn’t know, the Muslem distain for western lifesyle and philosophy predates my lifetime, certainly hers. Perhaps she may want to do a little research and find out just how far back it goes.
“just how far back it goes”
Yes, many hundreds of years ago Muslim travellers were reporting with horror and disgust on how Western women were allowed to appear in public, socialize, speak their minds, and actually be treated as something a bit more than property.
Yes, I’m sure that Geyer can teach us all why we should be apologizing to Muslims.
[...] His latest catch? BuzzMachine highlights the gargantuan hubris of one Ms Georgie Anne Geyer and her piece entitled ‘Without newspapers, Americans can’t understand the world‘. [...]
Off-topic: I need to start trackbacking here, but I don’t know how that’s possible, if it is possible. Any help would be appreciated.
I agree with most of the posters here on this woman’s comments. Jeremy, Kris, TC@Leather Penguin, David Cooke, jblog, Percival L, pst314: all of you raise good points.
330angelo & Easton Ellsworth raise points I’d like to expand on. The blogosphere is decentralized. Does that mean it keeps us trapped, to some degree, in our own little worlds? And what is the cost of centralization, if that is needed? Does it mean a marriage between media and money must be forged, a marriage that is imperfect and ripe for abuse?
Most of you have focused on how we can use the blogosphere to find the relevant and important info we need. And you’ve pointed out quite rightly that the decentralized blogosphere allows for an awareness and participation that just didn’t exist when the MSM was the only game in town.
But take note of how Buzzmachine works. This blog gets a lot of attention because it is in dialogue with the MSM to some degree, in that it is engaged with the problem of centralized/decentralized media outlets.
Which brings up via metaphor the really, really deep question: To what degree do we, as citizens, need something in common, a common point of reference, to have a discussion that can be fruitful to all parties? It isn’t enough to speak the same language; what we need is something which sets the agenda, if not the exact facts of a situation. And that something, which exists in school as a syllabus, exists in a looser form in the media as a newspaper. We can point to it and say “so-and-so said this in this editorial,” and then have a debate about whether it should even be the topic (something that can’t be done in school, of course).
What will characterize Web 3.0 (when that happens), I think, is a recentralization trend, as opposed to an enabling trend. Google triumphed because it enabled. But it’s Yahoo’s directories which make Yahoo a force, still. What we need to do as bloggers who want blogging to mean more is ask what character we want the recentralization to take on. We don’t want big money tied to sensationalism and marketable crap masquerading as journalism. But we do need to recognize that there are things we don’t know, and maybe we need to orient journalism around expertise or a particular moral stance, and work from there. Maybe we need to think in terms of groups of bloggers as opposed to individual bloggers, and focus on the strengths of real time and cooperation.
Of course, these things are happening now, but you know what I mean. It does no good to bash the MSM at some point. They’re pathetic because they’re trying not to lose something of which they don’t understand the full significance of. The truth is probably that newspapers were more significant than the woman writing above even knows. And we need to figure out what that significance was and consolidate it, if the New Media is to prevail and be something lasting and productive and beneficial.
i agree that there is a problem with people picking their news source but it has more to do with ideology and less to do with format. an abundance of formats is helpfull. too many people choose a news source that shares their ideology (almost never objective) and dont bother to seek news elswhere. if the news people are getting is less than comprehensive this is why. damn capitalism and ingenuity for giving us too many options for news. what is to be done?
Too bad journalists don’t have to study history. I thought the Hearst papers started the Spanish American war.
Personally I find the BBC and PRI added to the NY Times do a pretty good job of covering world news. Domestic is another matter…
I don’t have any particular liking for Geyer (who incidentally always struck me as a paleocon), but I think Jeff is reading too much into her piece. All she said was that better coverage of Afghanistqan might have made us more aware of the dangerous terror situation growing there and opened our eyes to the possibility of a major terrorist attack.
As far as Iraq goes, I doubt the bloggers would have made such difference. But the fact is that the mainstream media including the NYT went along pretty much like poodles with the admin’s lies.
> All she said was that better coverage of Afghanistqan might have made us more aware of the dangerous terror situation growing there and opened our eyes to the possibility of a major terrorist attack.
When has coverage made us aware of a major attack that occurred? Why would this time be any different?
Note that it’s unclear that MSM would warn us of an impending attack. Many professional journalists believe that it would be wrong to tell US troops about an ambush, so why is it likely that they’d spill the beans about an attack?
ashok,
I don’t think historical patterns suggest that Web 3.0 will be about recentralization. In the West, revolutionary milestones have been about enabling the individual, chipping away at the power the elite have to disseminate information top-down.
Whether we start with the Roman Republic, the Renaissance, or the American Revolution…new avenues have been created to level the playing field and increase freedom. Eventually, though, those avenues are purchased in spades by concentrations of power and wealth followed by struggles and/or innovations to increase freedom and make it even more difficult to take it away.
Imagining this pattern and its continuation, the question I ask is will there ever be an innovation so revolutionary that it cannot be purchased, even by all of the wealth on earth or owned even by the strongest coercive force?
You ask an interesting question: do we need a mainstream media in order to have something to talk about at a national level (if I’ve understood you accurately)? I think the answer to that is “no.” That’s like saying we need a mainstream cough to catch a cold. The innate viral nature of overlapping social networks is sufficient for “mainstream” to emerge from the bottom up, rather than the top-down. Instead of being told what the news is, it is determined by a natural consensus.
Essentially, everything is flipped upside down…and it still works, but “better.” Instead of starting with one story carefully crafted by a professional fact spinner that is broadcast to the masses and then picked apart, stories are told to smaller audiences and undergo mass scrutiny before the story spreads into the mainstream.
We can see this happening all around us, but if the MSM ignores it or dances around it…the masses will never know. No doubt, there is a certain debt owed to the MSM and all journalism of the past…without it, something like Web 2.0 would never have been possible.
Ultimately, it isn’t us who need the mainstream media in order to communicate with each other. It is the mainstream media that needs us in order for it to communicate at all.
like all other embedded forms of social authority, albeit sclerotic, the MSM cleaves to a fantasy that they are some type of quasi-constitutional guild which must exist in the form they define for now & forever. In many ways their demands are more and more resembling that of organized religion – right down to you must have faith, we have your best interests at heart. I personally like chaos – in the end you get convergence, self sorting & selection. The quest for news on the internet is fun and educational – i have to read things in order to ask the right questions. recently one of the weekly (how funny is that?) news magazines posited that GWB exists in a bubble – maybe yes, maybe no – but the MSM represented by the views of Ms. Geyer most certainly live in a decrepit fantasy world of their own construction.
“When has coverage made us aware of a major attack that occurred? Why would this time be any different?”
All she says is “might”. I don’t really agree with her, but its possible
“Note that it’s unclear that MSM would warn us of an impending attack. Many professional journalists believe that it would be wrong to tell US troops about an ambush, so why is it likely that they’d spill the beans about an attack? ”
We’re not talking about details of an impending attack. We’re talking about the dangerous terror situation growing there, which could lead to an actual major attack. Not the details of the attack itself.
I remember the MSM coverage of Afghanistan pre-9/11. Nice before and after shots of the Buddha statues the Taliban blew to pieces. That pretty much sums up what the spoon-feeders gave us on the Taliban before their “guest’s” plan to murder 3,000 Americans happened.
Still waiting for the MSM to rerun 9/11 footage and remind people what happened that day.
Still waiting for the MSM to rerun 9/11 footage and remind people what happened that day.
What do you mean ? There is always plenty of 911 coverage at the anniversary time and there is coverage in documentaries et al.
330angelo – I disagree, but very much enjoyed your commentary.
I’m beginning to think that anyone who writes for mainstream publication has to take a vow that they will remain unfamiliar with history.
“..we have lost that comprehensive view of the world that only a newspaper gives.”
Anyone remember Hearst?
> We’re talking about the dangerous terror situation growing there, which could lead to an actual major attack. Not the details of the attack itself.
Has MSM done anything comparable in the past? If not, why would that time have been different?
[...] It’s amazing how palpable sand can become to the heads of industry during innovative times. [...]
yes, we americans are proud of our stupidity as if we had a stick up our ass..
Think a little further. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world — the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week — it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people.
Yes, if only the mainstream media had been allowed into Iraq to thoroughly, accurately, honestly cover Saddam Hussein’s regime! Why, I was telling Eason Jordan that just the other day …
I recently took an on-line journalism class where it was abundantly clear that the point of the class was to warn me of how the world is going to fall apart because of bloggers. Only the MSM really knew how to evaluate what news I should be reading and that I was incapable of understanding the world without the MSM help. It was almost identical to the education classes that told me only “educators” were capable of deiciding what my children should learn and that parents were the LAST people who should be deciding what information their children receive. Recognize a theme here? I know better than you do, what is best for you – and for everyone else.
I get my ideologically favorite viewpoints from MSM and read blogs and such for the “other” side.
I agree with many of the other posts in that it is a huge leap to blame American ignorance or misinformation on blogging. The media definitely has the power to shape public opinion, and when given biased information, such as the FSA presented during the Great Depression, the public is likely to follow blindly. FSA photographers presented photographs to show the successes of the New Deal, and their control over what was released allowed them to pick what image (namely success or failure) they wanted to present.
As mentioned in the blog, whether we like it or not, many leads and headlines stay with us. Although many blogs are inaccurate and misinforming, we can only blame ourselves for believing them. Everyone has the opportunity to research the credibility of the source and to do further research on the topic in general to assure themselves of the most accurate information possible. I agree that Americans often pick and chose news and lose the comprehenseive view of the world, but I also think that it is obtainable if one really wants it. Blaming blogging seems like a scapegoat for people too lazy or too busy to find what they want to know.