http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1059-1520138,00.html March 11, 2005Under my keyboard the desk shakes. The bloggers are on the march
Simon JenkinsSINCE THE DAYS of Caxton the tools of my trade have been familiar. Whatever I write is somehow transformed into letters incised in relief. This miracle — the printing craft was called “the mystery” — has not changed in essence since the Middle Ages. The surface is duly smeared with ink and pressed on to dead trees, to be carried out into the street and read. The gods of print served impartially Chaucer and Shakespeare, the Bible, The Times and Playboy magazine. Civilisation’s most glorious invention, I assumed, would see me out.
I am not so sure. When the internet arrived I thought it was like the non-stick pan or the self-lighting match, a novelty of uncertain necessity or future. The web, I wrote, would be of interest to law researchers and sex fiends. Who else would want the Library of Congress on their kitchen table and a club bore ranting on their desk? When the chat room and the web-log (blog) arrived, they were surely of use only to librarians, lonely hearts and those suffering rare tropical diseases.
This week I attended a seminar in Washington on the future of opinion journalism. Normally such seminars are places where underworked neophiliacs fry each other’s brains. This time I felt the earth shake. The talk was dominated by bloggers. They were everywhere, permanently online to each other through 3G handsets. The dedicated blogger updates his site two or three times day, as if no gossip must go unpassed and no abuse go unanswered. It is manic.
These people claim to be the unofficial legislators of free opinion. They quake, rant, muckrake, scream like 17th-century Puritans. Most of the blog sites regurgitate and spin what the mainstream media (dismissively the “MSM”) has spent millions finding and checking. Most are fanatically conservative. All you need is a taste for exhibitionism and a fancy name: mediabistro, FishBowlDC, wonkette. One Yahoo blogger, Ted Rall, gives warning of the blogosphere: “A new sheriff’s in town. He’s drunk. He’s mean, and he works for the bad guys.” The web is the Bushites’ revenge on the liberal media establishment. A blog polarises or dies.
The web has undoubtedly honoured its claim to be the democracy of the air. Every columnist’s motto may be Milton’s “Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making”. But to what end? On the web, opinion travels first class while facts go steerage. The opinion blogs that I occasionally read — one is formed every seven seconds — show scant respect for the disciplines of journalism. This is a game anyone can play. A case before a California court is seeking to establish if bloggers are “journalists” and can thus enjoy legal protection under the Constitution. The bloggers protest that they are merely doing what newspapers fail to do, “keeping the bad guys honest”, but that begs the question. The Apple corporation, beset by employees blogging its trade secrets, is desperate to defend itself.
What is clear is that the blogosphere has taken the press temporarily by storm. I have spent most of my life reading of the death of newspapers. I took comfort from the French portraitist, Delaroche, who declared on seeing the first photograph, “From this day painting is dead”. Newpapers have been upstaged successively by the teleprinter, radio, television and now the internet. Each barbarian wave arrives at the gates of Rome and claims to be “ resetting the agenda”. Each assimilates into the local population.
Certainly the dead trees edition of The Times is bought by some 700,000 people while five times as many visit the Times Online worldwide. The e-mail response to what I and others write has soared. Producing a formal newspaper has become an electronic conversation between screens and keyboards. I can well see that buying a paper may come to be a luxury when it is available on screen everywhere for nothing. But then plays seemed a luxury with the coming of movies, concerts with the coming of records, cinemas with the coming of DVDs, books with the coming of everything. Somehow the old media survived, and prospered.
In large part the success of the blog in America is a function of the rapid decline in newspaper competition, a classic of monopoly capitalism in league with monopoly labour. An academic observer, Philip Meyer, has calculated that at the present rate of fall the last newspaper will be read in April, 2040 (and still looking as if it was designed in the 1930s). Small wonder media schools are teaching “convergence journalism”, much as chefs teach fusion cuisine. They are trying to instil the disciplines of journalism to the web. The problem is that the appeal of the blog is precisely that it can escape those disciplines. Many are just noise, the dial set to the frequency of a particular prejudice.
The problem for conventional journalism is to prove that such qualities as newsgathering and reliability are worth more than a scream of opinion, enough to get people to part with money. I notice how often blogs refer to items witnessed on television or read in The New York Times. Someone must gather this stuff, check it, source it, write and edit it. These are not professional trivia but the essence of open debate. The mainstream media have to make money or the blog’s professional resource will die. With newspaper sales declining and news bureaux shutting down across the world, the outlook is not good. It was never more true that opinion is free, facts are expensive.
British papers need not worry — as yet. Such much-cited blog triumphs as the toppling of Eason Jordan, the CNN executive, and the humiliation of CBS’s Dan Rather would not have needed the web to expose them in Britain. They would have been splashed across every tabloid. The American press remains timid. The Patriot Act suffered nothing like the press mauling given to Tony Blair’s control order legislation.
I have great respect for American journalism. Despite its frequent pomposity, it remains the central platform for “speaking truth to power”. In the madhouse of the American media, institutions such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the news networks can seem the last fingertips by which American opinion grips a hold of external reality. But they are monolithic. When they ignore a story, they lay themselves open to the howling of the blog. British journalism howls in print, day and night.
Yet the ground did shake under me. Earlier threats to the press came from new conduits of news and information. Today’s goes to the heart of my trade. It peddles opinion. I can pretend to occupy a higher plane. I can try pleading factual accuracy, consistency, uncorruptibility and a quote or two from Shakespeare. But in truth I too am a blogger, snatching at some item of passing news to argue a case and persuade. And I charge for it. The blogger does it for nothing. I am on my mettle as never before.
So move over, Caxton, the mystery is no more. The whistle-blowers, e-babies, inside-outers, wonkettes, quacks and cranks have globalised Speakers’ Corner. They have rebuilt the Tower of Babel and put microphones on top of it. Amid the noise, a still small voice of reason will still be heard. But it may require the help of Microsoft, not dead trees.