Problems with the Gist of Democracy

Posted on August 20, 2007 in Blogging Journalists & Pundits

Professor [[Michael Skube]] thinks that blogs are nothing more than a noise machine, that bloggers are not journalists. Thank you, Dr. Skube for seeing what most bloggers have known all along. We’re not part of the establishment.

Skube decries our failure to take risks (tell that to Majikthise and me for that matter). I countersuggest that this culture of risk-taking, of getting onto the battlefields, the survivalist camps, etc. may distort the true picture of the world. If you hang around all the places where violence is happening, you’re going to believe that the world is a uniformly violent place.

One thing that impressed me when I went to Croatia in 1992 was the large parts of the country that were not emeshed in the war. The same held true for Serbia. Farmers grew tobacco. Trollies ran on time. Put down in the right place you could buy into the proposition that the nation was at peace, that the distant booms of gunfire that you could only hear on the fringes were something else.

Think now of the United States which is embroiled in two wars. What have you seen of soldiers and civilians falling here? The war is playing out as entertainment for we safe ones. News coverage does not enhance our decision-making but plays us for rubes.

Journalists love wars for the adrenaline rush and the chance to tell an offbeat story that we’re hearing too much today. (No, not an offbeat story about how the war is a sham and the people of Iraq don’t deserve this treatment. An offbeat story about violence and alleged success swatting Iraqi cockroaches down served straight from the military spin machine.) Their obsession with getting in leads them to make devil’s bargains: we will not speak badly of the military lest they take away our press credentials.

I see bloggers as a necessary check from the place where the war is not happening. My friends and I who worry about the peacetime effects of war — [[post-traumatic stress disorder]] for example — don’t print out the words of the military spin machine (which is now telling us that PTSD is a [[personality disorder]] and therefore the fault of those who have it). Skube calls us guilty of manifesto because we don’t “weigh out both sides of the issue” (something which Skube himself does not do in his opinion piece.)

If I am to single out any problem with journalism that I find most debilitating it is its insistence that both sides be “weighed out” even though one side has been thoroughly discredited. A classic example of this is the creationism versus evolutionism “debate”. I believe that journalists have contributed a great deal to the legitimacy of creationists by treating their side as equal in weight and evidence to the evolutionist side. It has only been the miracle of a capable judiciary (a fact that could change thanks to Bush) and scientists willing to defend the scientific method that has prevented the tinpots from taking over. But to read the papers, the evolutionists have no more grounds for their view than the creationists do. The theory of evolution is falling apart, they echo the Creationists saying, which shows that those writing the stories have little or no understanding of scientific debate. A little appreciation of the scientific method would quickly reveal why this debate should not even be covered. It only brings in dollars that the Creationists can use to destroy education.

Manifestos dominate blogging because journalists have left us with the need to work overtime to counter their failure to investigate their stories deeply enough. The press may be the fourth estate, but I dare say that the public — manifest in bloggers — represents what could be called the Mega-Estate, the one that encloses the other four and keeps them in check. Unlike journalists, we’re not in it for the money, but for ourselves as taxpayers and human beings. If Skube doesn’t like this as a justification for blogging, then he has a problem with the gist of Democracy.

For another, perhaps better answer to Skube, click here.

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In other news, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist asks us to forget about who has the most money and the biggest poll numbers: tell us what the ideas are. Echoing that could be a very good thing for bloggers to do.

[tags]journalism, journalists and pundits, journalists & pundits, blogging, blogs, punditry[/tags]