The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

This post is actually a first draft of a research-based essay that I am writing for English class. Since I didn’t really know how to start off this essay with research, I decided to approach the first draft as though it were one of my blog posts, and would hold off on integrating other sources until later revisions (and some initial feedback from my professor). Certainly if you have any constructive criticism, feel free to comment, as it can only help me to produce a stronger final product. Even then, it’s still nice to get my thoughts on this subject out in the open without being constrained by any requirements whatsoever.

Welcome to the end of another decade in American history. That’s right. With all of this “change” stuff sweeping the country this year, perhaps you forgot that the 2010s will be sweeping in in just a few months’ time. Looking back at the 2000s, the “golden millennial decade” (I actually just made that term up), it’s painstakingly obvious that a whole lot has changed in this country in the past ten years. But probably nothing else has changed as dramatically as the media.

Think about it. When the 2000 presidential election came down to a great big mess in Florida, or when the 9/11 attacks happened, how did those stories spread across the country? You most likely heard about those on the TV news, or if you were a bit on the slower side, you read about them in the newspaper. Nouns such as “blogs,” “podcasts,” or “tweets” weren’t even a part of our consciousness yet. Now fast forward to this year. The January 2009 plane landing in the Hudson River first broke on Twitter. This summer, journalists who were barred from covering the controversy and protests following the Iranian elections turned to the internet and social networks to find news postings and online videos from people who were on the ground in Iran. Newspapers across the country are shutting down every week or converting into online-only reporting. People get their news not just from television, radio, and newspapers, but now they also get their news from blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, aggregated news sources via Google, and a whole host of other sources. Not only can they get their news whenever they want from wherever they are, but they now have the power to choose the news they’ll use, and even make it themselves.

“Traditional” news media has realized this, and has attempted to catch up to the trend by trying to get “hip” to this new social media realm, with CNN arguably leading the charge. In 2006, they introduced their “iReport” feature, inviting anyone to submit videos, photos, or just text that they considered newsworthy. CNN would then identify certain iReports that they deemed newsworthy (and claimed to have “vetted” for factual accuracy) to air on their network. Late in the 2008 presidential campaign, CNN also took the lead in broadening out to incorporating existing social networks as well, most notably Twitter, and to a lesser extent, YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace. These moves have definitely been popular, as CNN’s competitors have also hopped on board with their own iReport-equivalents, along with their own use of blogs and social networks. Many people, especially in the tech world (like in this article from Mashable) have praised the networks for adopting and pushing social media forward. But is this big move to social media really pushing journalism and freedom of speech forward? Or is it just using Web 2.0 as a fad to add entertainment value to the news? Or furthermore, is it trading actual, experienced, vetted journalism for cheap crowd-sourced anecdotes?

Now I’m certainly not one to criticize social media: I use it every day. I’ve been using Twitter since the beginning of 2007–back when it was still a thing when most people hadn’t even heard of before. Okay, I’m not as avid of a social networking user as some people are: I don’t spend hours poking friends of Facebook, I don’t make videos of myself on YouTube, I only follow 22 people on Twitter (because who’s crazy enough to be able to follow thousands of other people?), and I’ve never touched MySpace. But in the grander scheme of things, social media has exploded with the unintended side effect of revolutionizing what the First Amendment is all about.

Why do I say unintended? Well, look at the face that social networking put forth when it got started. Facebook was developed by a couple of college students who wanted a way to stay connected to their friends; but now, campaigns and organizations are using it to directly connect with their grassroots supporters. Twitter still presents you with the rhetorical question “What are you doing?” when it prompts you to right those famous tweets of 140 characters or fewer (THAT’S the grammatically correct way to say it), even though the tweeting community has come up with all kinds of uses for it, from marketing, to research, to back-and-forth messaging, to spurting random thoughts from your brain (my specialty), to actually sharing what you’re doing right now. In one of the most interesting examples, New York Times Tech Columnist David Pogue has published a book, The World According to Twitter, exclusively featuring responses to random questions that Pogue issued to his half million followers. Despite many of its obvious shortcomings, it’s clear that social networking has revolutionized and democratized the way we communicate.

But there is a major caveat to consider with social media: it is not a journalistic medium, but rather, a collection of people’s opinions. Journalism, on the other hand, is a profession with a number of core values, arguably the key value being the principle of objectivity. It is this principle which states that the journalist has a responsibility to the public to fairly and accurately present all sides of the story, and to set his personal biases aside. Journalism is about digging beneath the surface, verifying statements by one source with other sources, and questioning the authority. There’s a reason that American University still has an active School of Communication, and why it’s not going away anytime soon. Practically anyone can write a blog, make a podcast, or film a video these days; we don’t need to go to school to learn how to communicate anymore because the tools are right at our fingertips. But there are still core values to journalism that have to be learned, and that’s why journalists get paid the big bucks.

At least, that’s a very idealistic view of journalism, which in recent years, particularly on cable news channels, has largely sacrificed journalism for entertainment value, and introduced a significant amount of widely perceived bias, which has now become quite stereotypical for the networks. Fox News Channel is generally regarded as an extremely right-wing channel, and MSNBC is generally regarded as an increasingly left-wing channel. CNN remains generally regarded as being “in between,” but they’ve been adding so many gimmicks recently–from awkwardly-titled segments like “Just Sayin’” to magic touchscreens to holograms–that it seems that they’re more interested in entertaining special effects than reporting the news. And the way that they have embedded social networking into their news shows isn’t much better.

Let’s take a look at an example scenario from last June, after the murder of George Tiller (the abortion doctor). After covering the story, CNN anchor Don Lemon headed over to Twitter to see what the viewers were saying. Julia1970 said, “I think this is just awful. I don’t understand why people think its ok to kill grownups but not babies. I just don’t get it.” bugsact said, “Fighting for the life of children should not include killing a doctor. This kind of logic is crazy thinking.”
Okay, that’s great, and I’m sure that it’s a big ego boost for those tweeters who get to see their weird username on TV, and may get a few more followers in the process. But how does that really enhance the value of the news that I’m watching? Or as Jon Stewart pointed out on The Daily Show, “Whenever I’m troubled with the difficult moral question of abortion, I think to myself, ‘What would bugsact say?’”

Now I’m sure that some people will question my disapproval of the traditional media’s obsession with social networking. After all, isn’t this a way to give a voice to the general public? Doesn’t this break the barrier of having to have a whole bunch of equipment, people to work that equipment, and an FCC license in order to make your voice heard through the traditional media of television or radio? Don’t the declining ratings of television and radio, and the consistently-predicted death of newspapers mean that the internet is only going to grow as the means through which we get our news? Isn’t citizen journalism, as it’s commonly called, the future of journalism?

Maybe that is what the distant future holds. No one can really tell. But as for the immediate future, I reject this view. “Crowd-sourced journalism” would be better than “citizen journalism” as a means to describe how traditional media companies are currently using social networks. Individuals may be producing tweets or iReports on their own, but it’s still the media company that decides which of them hit the airwaves and which of them don’t. The media is still chief in establishing the national news agenda, reporting on the stories they want in the manner that they always have, and then cherry-picking comments from viewers via these social networks in order to get a sampling of public opinion, which often (particularly on the more niche issues) reflects the conclusion that the news story already made. The main difference is that in place of paying reporters to go to places to cover the news and get opinion from members of the public, they can now pull up an iReport and do the same thing for free.

But what about the future growth of social media? It’s true that the growth of Web 2.0 has definitely introduced some serious competition to traditional media, and has stolen a bit of “market share,” if you will, away from them. But contrary to what one would expect, making it so much easier for people to have instant access to information, and to just as easily be able to post information, actually does not lead us to a clearer understanding of our shared reality. We have actually seen the internet be used to help spread misinformation. In Farhad Manjoo’s book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, which I read this summer as assigned reading for AU (it was a great book though, in my opinion), he identifies a number of examples in which the net has been able to spread false facts. A clear example is the Swift Boat Veterans ad campaign that took place in 2004, planting what was later found to be completely false claims concerning John Kerry’s military conduct in Vietnam. There was no factual basis for their claims, yet they spread from a small internet site into a national TV ad campaign to the mainstream media to the national consciousness, and may have been a key component in costing John Kerry the presidency in 2004. He even shows the same fallacies on the left side of the aisle, identifying a number of people who posted “findings” on how the 2004 election was stolen from John Kerry within hours after the polls closed, and were even accepted by journalists such as then-New York Times columnist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yet within a few months, nationally acclaimed scholars from major universities in the area of studying election procedures subsequently published studies proving that despite any possible misconduct in Florida or Ohio, any votes that could have been gained by Kerry would not at all have been enough for him to win the election. Therefore, it seems to me that if the future of journalism lies in social media, journalistic integrity will diminish, not expand.

But why does any of this matter? So what if the news media misrepresents the intent of social networking to add to the entertainment value of the news? It matters because, whether we realize it or not, the media affects all of us, either directly or indirectly. Even if we barely acknowledge the established media, what’s going on in our world still affects the conversations that we have with friends, right? It establishes the national conversation, and therefore direct impacts our country’s national policy. Unless you make the pilgrimage to your state capitol or to Congress every single day, then your view of our national politics, world events, or basically anything outside of the neighborhood where you live and work, is based on looking through the spectacles of the media. And when the media doesn’t do its job and uphold its journalistic integrity, it can lead our entire country astray. We saw this during the run-up to the war in Iraq, when the media failed to question the lies about there being weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Thousands of people would still be alive today had the media done their job then.

Now the media, like so many other parts of our lives and our world, is in a stage of significant and constant flux. It is critical for us to keep a very close eye on how the media operates and where it heads in the future so that we can protect not just our First Amendment right to freedom of speech, but the integrity of that freedom of speech as well.