Happy birthday; The new media

Happy birthday

This is the first anniversary of baroneblog. Thanks to my editors, present and past, at U.S. News, who have made this possible, and to my readers, who have made it worthwhile. This week I'm busy promoting the paperback edition of The New Americans. Anyone who would like to improve my Amazon.com ranking is invited to do so.

The new media

Nicholas Lemann, head of the Columbia Journalism School, has an interesting article on the blogosphere and the press in the New Yorker. Lemann is a thoughtful observer and a fine writer, and there's much that is worthwhile in his piece. The best part, in my view, is his discussion of the pamphlet and periodical press of late 17th- and early 18th-century England. He cites historian Mark Knights's book Representation and Misrepresentation in Late Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture. (The hardcover is $120 on Amazon.com, and for £68, not much less, on amazon.co.uk.) In the book I've been writing on the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, I've encountered the pamphlet literature of the day, and I agree with Lemann that it resembles in many ways the "new media" of the blogosphere. And it had great political impact. Prince William of Orange, in preparing his invasion of England in the fall of 1688, had secretly printed in the Netherlands and secretly distributed in England 60,000 copies of his pamphlet declaring his reasons for the invasion--an amazing feat and an enormous printing considering that England's population was about 5 million at the time. King James II's government tried to suppress this Declaration but found it could not do so; instead it reprinted it with its own counterarguments.

Here are Lemann's paragraphs on the subject:

The "new media" of later Stuart Britain were pamphlets and periodicals, made possible not only by the advent of the printing press but by the relaxation of government censorship and licensing regimes, by political unrest, and by urbanization (which created audiences for public debate). Today, the best known of the periodicals is Addison and Steele's Spectator, but it was one of dozens that proliferated almost explosively in the early seventeen-hundreds, including The Tatler, The Post Boy, The Medley, and The British Apollo. The most famous of the pamphleteers was Daniel Defoe, but there were hundreds of others, including Thomas Sprat, the author of "A True Account and Declaration of the Horrid Conspiracy Against the Late King" (1685), and Charles Leslie, the author of "The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd's Cloathing" (1704). These voices entered a public conversation that had been narrowly restricted, mainly to holders of official positions in church and state. They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved.

As media, Knights points out, both pamphlets and periodicals were radically transformative in their capabilities. Pamphlets were a mass medium with a short lead time--cheap, transportable, and easily accessible to people of all classes and political inclinations. They were, as Knights puts it, "capable of assuming different forms (letters, dialogues, essays, refutations, vindications, and so on)" and, he adds, were "ideally suited to making a public statement at a particular moment." Periodicals were, by the standards of the day, "a sort of interactive entertainment," because of the invention of letters to the editor and because publications were constantly responding to their readers and to one another.

Then as now, the new media in their fresh youth produced a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style. Knights writes, "Polemical print . . . challenged conventional notions of how rhetoric worked and was a medium that facilitated slander, polemic, and satire. It delighted in mocking or even abusive criticism, in part because of the conventions of anonymity." But one of Knights's most useful observations is that this was a self-limiting phenomenon. Each side in what Knights understands, properly, as the media front in a merciless political struggle between Whigs and Tories soon began accusing the other of trafficking in lies, distortions, conspiracy theories, and special pleading, and presenting itself as the avatar of the public interest, civil discourse, and epistemologically derived truth. Knights sees this genteeler style of expression as just another political tactic, but it nonetheless drove print publication toward a more reasoned, less inflamed rhetorical stance, which went along with a partial settling down of British politics from hot war between the parties to cold. (Full-dress British newspapers, like the Times and the Guardian, did not emerge until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, well into this calmer period and long after Knights ends his story.) At least in part, Internet journalism will surely repeat the cycle, and will begin to differentiate itself tonally, by trying to sound responsible and trustworthy in the hope of building a larger, possibly paying audience.

An excellent analysis.

Lemann goes on to examine the development of American media from the 19th century to the present day, and in the process I think gets something wrong:

When journalism was at its most blandly authoritative--probably in the period when the three television broadcast networks were in their heyday and local newspaper monopoly was beginning to become the rule--so were American politics and culture, and you have to be very media-centric to believe that the press established the tone of national life rather than vice versa.

Here I think Lemann is conflating two different periods.

The first is the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, when the dominant print media (the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Time) and the three monopoly networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) might indeed be characterized as "blandly authoritative," to which I would add "generally supportive of American government and institutions and understanding that the United States was morally preferable to its enemies." William Shirer in Berlin and Edward R. Murrow on the rooftops of London, two models for post-World War II journalists, were not neutral in the struggle between the Nazis and the Allies. They were in no doubt as to who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

The second period is the second half of the 1960s and on through the 1970s and 1980s, when the dominant print media (the NYT, Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek) and the three broadcast news networks, as yet unchallenged by cable news, took an increasingly adversarial stance toward American government and institutions and an increasingly partisan stand against Republicans and conservatives. Lemann, who was on the Harvard Crimson in the 1970s, in his writings has seemed reluctant to admit that what I call Old Media have taken such an adversarial and partisan stand; he seems wedded to the idea that Old Media are simply being "objective" and that reasonable people could not be expected to operate differently.

Which brings to mind a conversation with a broadcast network news executive I remember from many years ago.

Q. Don't you think it affects your work product that 90 percent of your people are Democrats?

A. No, no, our people are objective, they have professional standards, they report fairly.

Q. Then doesn't that mean that your work product would be the same if 90 percent of your people were Republicans?

(Quickly) A. No, then it would be biased.

Only liberals, in this view, can see the world accurately.

Lemann seems to subscribe to that view too, though he's too careful to say so out loud. Which mars what otherwise is quite a thoughtful and perceptive analysis of new media over the centuries.