In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, we instituted a complicated emergency alert system, involving sirens, loudspeakers, text messages, and emails. The whole thing gets tested far more frequently than it really needs to-- every few weeks, we get a barrage of emails warning us that a test is coming up, then another barrage of emails and text messages on the day of the test.
The system has been used exactly once, and it was a fiasco. A year or so ago, we got a flurry of messages telling us that there had been a shooting a couple of blocks from campus. These directed everyone to a web page for more information (which wasn't actually at the address given), and for the rest of the day, there was a steady stream of updates about how the police were looking for suspects fitting a vague description, driving a car of indeterminate type, and so on.
It took several hours for all of this urgent! emergency! information! to settle down into the actual facts of the case, which were nothing at all like the nervous-making initial messages. I'm still hazy on the details, but the actual story was that there were gunshots fired a mile or two from campus, and a car with bullet holes in the windows had been moved to a parking spot six or eight blocks from campus.
I thought of this when I was reading Bora's novella about new media and news reporting.
(OK, "reading" is an overstatement. "Skimming the first few sections of" is closer to the truth, because I have a day job, and it doesn't involve me reading that much bloggy triumphalism.)
Bora's piece is longer than most articles on the subject, but the basic content appears to be the same as the last N posts about how blogs can replace/ improve upon traditional media. Bloggers and Twitter-ers and "Citizen Journalists" can generate lots of immediate on-the-scene information about important events, so it's not true that blogs can't report the news.
All of that is perfectly true, but I don't see how it's helpful. Or, rather, I don't see how it fixes the major problems with the existing media structure.
To borrow a distinction that Greg Bear was making at length at Boskone, the problem is not that traditional media don't deliver enough information. The problem is that they don't deliver enough knowledge. We're not suffering from a dearth of breathless on-the-scene reportage, but a lack of filtering of that breathless reportage to produce useful knowledge about what's actually going on.
Bloggers, media critics, and Comedy Central fake-news anchors rightly mock the major news networks for latching onto trivial stories-of-the-moment, but that's not a problem of a lack of information-- quite the contrary. They're providing tons of information, but it's useless information about stupid stuff.
This blizzard of trivia is inevitable, though, for the simple reason that there just aren't that many truly important events happening on any given day. There are some events-- the September 11th attacks, the beginning of a war, etc.-- that really do demand hour-by-hour coverage, but those events, thankfully, are few and far between. Most stories that are really important develop over days if not weeks or months. But when you have a 24-hour cable news channel, you need to put something on the hair for all 24 of those hours, so you end up latching onto trivialities to fill the time.
Blogs don't really improve on this. The political/news blogs I read focus on different trivialities, but in the end, they're not doing anything all that much better than CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News-- you could easily distill the hundreds of blog posts crossing my RSS reader every day into a daily or weekly digest, with no loss of useful information.
They're not doing anything wrong, any more than the campus emergency alert system was doing anything wrong in passing along the information they got. What we got was more or less what the police were getting and passing along to campus safety, and in a certain sense, it's a fascinating document of how this sort of event unfolds. It's nice to have that information in retrospect, but the number of people who actually need that information as it arrives is very small, and does not include 99.9% of the people getting the various alert messages.
What we need is not so much newer and better sources of information, what we need is a better way to filter the information that we're getting. Bora gives examples of a bunch of messages that might've turned up on Twitter regarding the plane landing on the Hudson a while back, and it's perfectly true the example messages he gives would be really great information to have:
"A plane just landed on Hudson"
"A plane landed on Hudson, took pic with cellphone, see it here:"
"A plane landed on Hudson, on ferry going to save people"
"A plane landed on Hudson, I am on it, everyone alive"
"I am a pilot. I just landed a plane on Hudson. Bird strike - both engines"
These are all great stuff. The problem is picking those out from:
"OMG! A plane just crashed!"
"A plane crash, oh the humanity!
"Terrorists just shot down a plane!"
"Somebody just hijacked a plane and flew it into the Statue of Liberty!"
to say nothing of all the "My cat's breath smells like cat food!" and "Britney Spears iz fat LOL!1!!!1!" stuff that's just noise.
If you happen to be looking in the right place at the right moment, new media can deliver wonderful immediate coverage. But then, so can old media. The problem with both is knowing where you need to be looking while things are happening. Most of the really great examples of on-the-scene reporting via blogs or Twitter or whatever are things that prove to be great hours or days later-- when somebody who knows how the events played out looks back at what was written at the time, and picks out the handful of sources that had everything right.
So, while Bora makes a convincing case that new media tools could take over and improve on the role of traditional media outlets, I don't think I believe this is a Good Thing. The big problem I see is that the 24-hour news cycle is leading to an oversupply of trivial or even incorrect information. Rather than fixing things, blogs seem to me to turn that up to 11, and I don't think that's going to be helpful.
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Coincidentally, last night a man was shop dead on the edge of campus here at Radford University. I live a few blocks from campus, so I have registered both my landline and my cellphone so that I can receive alerts. A total of three separate messages were sent out, and the university's web page defaulted to an alert setting. The university was locked down from roughly 9:30 pm until 3 pm, by which time a systematic sweep of the campus had been completed. (The shooting occurred on the edge of campus, but the gunman was seen fleeing onto campus--toward the student union, in fact.) I thought in this case the notifications were handled well: we weren't bombarded with information, but we were clearly instructed as to what to do (shelter in place).
That should have read that the campus was locked down from 9:30 pm to 3 am, not 9:30 pm to 3 pm. But 3 am was stressful enough. I have already spoken to both one colleague and one student who were stuck in classroom buildings throughout the lockdown.
Your point seems to be that there needs to be a filter on news, lest we fall into the trap of too much trivial or irrelevant information, and that the rise of blogs makes it easier to fall into this trap. On this point, I agree with you.
The problem is, who does the filtering? One reason why blogs have come to prominence is that what little filtering the 24-hour news channels do, and the slightly more extensive filtering that newspapers do, does not achieve the stated goal of pointing people to the relevant information. (The actual goals are to encourage people to get their news from that source, and to focus on the information the publisher wants them to focus on.) This is how "All the News That's Fit to Print" transforms into "All the News That Fits, We Print". What blogs can do is to provide an outlet for reporting that the more mainstream sources overlook or weed out. At some level, however, you have to provide the filter yourself.
I only got a cell phone less than three years ago, and only because I sometimes needed to travel and realized that public telephones were an endangered species. I have deliberately avoided getting into texting (and let's not even think about Twitter) because I do not want or need the interruptions--which, at least with basic calling plans like the one I have, I have to pay money for--that come with the territory. AFAICT, texting has this in common with global thermonuclear war: the only winning move is not to play.
The problem is, who does the filtering? One reason why blogs have come to prominence is that what little filtering the 24-hour news channels do, and the slightly more extensive filtering that newspapers do, does not achieve the stated goal of pointing people to the relevant information. (The actual goals are to encourage people to get their news from that source, and to focus on the information the publisher wants them to focus on.) This is how "All the News That's Fit to Print" transforms into "All the News That Fits, We Print". What blogs can do is to provide an outlet for reporting that the more mainstream sources overlook or weed out. At some level, however, you have to provide the filter yourself.
I agree that this is part of the appeal of blogs, but I think they're subject to exactly the same failure mode. That is, bloggers who are trying to advance themselves within the informal hierarchy of blogs have an incentive to post about those topics that draw the most links and traffic. Which leads to more frequent posting and more sharply partisan posting, in much the same way that the incentives for old media push them toward round-the-clock breathless coverage of trivia and yelling head shows.
I think it's great that Josh Marshall is making a good showing as an entirely blog-based news operation, but it's often hard to see how what he does differs from what Fox News does, other than the direction of the partisan slant.
I think we don't need more news, but rather more and better filters for news. That's not something I see much discussion of in the endless "bloggers are better than journalists" debates, and I think that's a major problem.
No biggie. For a modest admission fee surcharge each incoming matriculant gets an HMX mastoid implant with a DES 56-bit key-encoded receiver (prototyped as the "CRM-114 discriminator" in 1964). In the event of campus disaster a janitor and the Dean of Students put their complimentary keys into the master receptical, push, turn clockwise (security!), and everybody who may be in harm's way is euthanized. Homeland Severity will generously provide unlimited funding and hold a copy of the DES key database for safekeeping. Freedom is compliance.
OTOH, three credit-hours of frosh training then everybody with a sufficient grade is issued a concealed carry permit. Campus tragedies drop to zero and stay there.
My university has a similar alert system. I've signed up to receive text message alerts this year, but so far there have been about a dozen tests of the system and only one legitimate message (which was for a tornado warning that I found out about through a TV alert, several emails, and a reverse-911 call from my city as well).
To me, the problem with the 24 hour news cycle is not just the trivia that gets passed off as news, but that in a true breaking story, most of what you hear and see on the news in the immediate aftermath is wrong or at best misleading. If you've ever watched coverage of an event you know even a little about, this becomes really obvious. I don't see how even more immediacy, in the form of tweets and "citizen journalists", are going to make this any better.
I think it's great that Josh Marshall is making a good showing as an entirely blog-based news operation, but it's often hard to see how what he does differs from what Fox News does, other than the direction of the partisan slant.
Marshall is in direct contact with his readership, so he has to admit when he's blown something (which has happened a few times). Newspaper editors and TV news personalities are insulated from their readership/viewership, so getting them to correct errors is significantly harder. Newspapers sometimes correct obvious factual errors in their reporting, but they let political spin pass without comment. Op-ed writers and TV types rarely correct even obvious factual errors. The fact that public figures effectively cannot sue for libel in the US doesn't help--I'm not advocating UK libel law as that goes too far in the other direction, but the bar in this country is definitely too high.
Not all blogs are as good as Talking Points Memo for news sources. Some blogs do turn in to echo chambers, especially when the site owners routinely censor opposing viewpoints.
I know that's a subtle difference, but it's a difference nonetheless. Blogs are hardly a solution to the problems inherent in the 24/7 news cycle. Blogs rose to prominence in part because they can solve a different problem the 24-hour news channels have--one that is not intrinsic to the 24/7 news cycle. In a universe where the news channels reported not just the talking points but the facts that would allow the viewer to decide if one or both parties in the dispute were full of bull, blogs would have remained a personal vanity tool on the internet, and sites like TPM and Eschaton would not need to exist.
Marshall is in direct contact with his readership, so he has to admit when he's blown something (which has happened a few times). Newspaper editors and TV news personalities are insulated from their readership/viewership, so getting them to correct errors is significantly harder. Newspapers sometimes correct obvious factual errors in their reporting, but they let political spin pass without comment.
My complaint about TPM is less about accuracy than about the choice of material (CNN would've been a better example, maybe). It provides a ton of information, much of it about completely trivial inside-baseball stuff. He'll go on for days about stuff that just isn't all that important, but something needs to be said.
Like many people, I got all caught up in the election last fall, and spent hours reading TPM, fivethirtyeight, and all the rest. I dropped them all a few weeks after the election, when it became clear to me that I was reading hour-by-hour commentary on events that were going to take weeks to unfold. I'm strongly considering dumping Political Animal from my RSS reader for much the same reason. It's a constant avalanche of words about parliamentary minutiae that won't amount to much of anything by the time actual legislation passes.
The problem with the US corporate news media today is that the right wing didn't like them and their message in the late 1970's and 1980's and pretty much managed to destroy them by co-option with people who report nonsense, are obvious political hacks and have reduced the good reporting to marginal things, replacing it with uninformed or deliberately wrong commentary. The American people have agreed mostly with this. I cringe at least once every half hour with bad or wrong information when listening to local commercial radio. Newspapers have simply failed at their task of reporting the truth and we get he-said, she-said kind of junk that is worse then useless.
Sorry I had a long drive and listened to an AM "news" station for a long time today. My mistake, I don't feel so good.
"the problem is not that traditional media don't deliver enough information. The problem is that they don't deliver enough knowledge"....think back again to the "legitimate" threat at Union that you refer to...think about who was responsible for writing those messages and you will understand why such little knowledge was gleaned...just saying....