I'll return to Warren Ellis' dystopian antihero in a moment, but as far as the substance of Jarvis' post is concerned (ostensibly a review of Good Night, and Good Luck) I think he ultimately misses the mark. He writes:
As courageous and laudable as Murrow’s stand against American tyranny was – and it was – I also wonder whether it helped lead to the downfall of Dan Rather, the downsizing of CBS News, and perhaps even the decline of mainstream journalism itself.
For Murrow’s triumph led to a half-century-long era of haughtiness, self-importance, and separation from the public in the news. That may not be his responsibility – though he is shown at the start and end of the film dismissing the decadence, escapism, distraction, and amusement of television and America’s mass tastes (either out of snobbery or more likely out of shame, since he, too, catered to them on his own celebrity slather show). His disciples came to believe that the wattage of their broadcast towers entitled them to equivalent power in society. They thought they were no longer hacks looking out for the common man – as common men themselves – but instead the saviors of society (and rich ones at that). They were the ones who dubbed themselves the Tiffany Network. They thought they could do no wrong.
And then along came Dan.
Arguing that the film's central confrontation of Murrow and Senator Joe McCarthy somehow prefigures the twilight of Big Media and the humiliation of Dan Rather seems a little too much. While it's true that Murrow was the poster boy for this newfound journalistic ideal of the unbiased quest for truth, this passionate belief in a quantifiable objective reality was infecting postwar American culture at-large. In the wake of the technological triumphs of the early 20th century, practitioners of disciplines that had traditionally eschewed the "scientific method" (such as many of the so-called soft sciences) now adopted its formal trappings of hypothesis and research.
Journalists having been the kissing cousins of historians since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides (I had a Greek professor who was fond of dismissing the former as "a mere journalist" compared to the latter), it's only natural that the move towards more scientific humanistic and social studies should have affected journalism along with history. In this sense Murrow and those who followed in his wake were part of a larger cultural moment that actually believed in such a thing as the Truth, which once discovered -- or uncovered, as the case may be -- would set us free.
And then along came Jack... Derrida, that is. Postmodernism more or less dropped the intellectual equivalent of a neutron bomb upon the basic precepts of Western thought, wreaking havoc the likes of which hadn't been experienced since the days of Rene Decartes. The notion of objectivity having effectively been demolished as an unattainable and dangerous myth, the scholars of the 20th century scrambled to make sense of a new relativistic era. While some fields such as anthropology and literary theory embraced the deconstructionist movement wholeheartedly (and perhaps too enthusiastically), other disciplines like history regarded it with a certain healthy skepticism, while several -- including most of the hard sciences as well as a few humanistic fields such as Classical Studies, which never met a modern theory of interpretation it didn't hate on -- regarded the postmodernist revolution as an existential challenge and fought it tooth and nail.
Journalism seemed to run the spectrum from the believers to the skeptics and the reactionaries. The sixties and seventies definitely saw renewed interest in the "news" of the common man and the issues of marginalization and resistance both at home and abroad. And skepticism of the official goings-on of the government certainly seemed justified in light of the Watergate Scandal and various other covert misdeeds by successive Presidential administrations and the misguided failure of the Vietnam War. But through it all the ideal of an objective and unbiased press persisted, even as other longtime hold-outs in the social sciences began to accept some form of postmodern thought as a necessary tool in modern theory and research.
Only recently has the idea of bias as an unavoidable consequence of the very act of reporting become an object of serious speculation in journalism. From conservatives' bleatings about the "liberal media" to the Left and Center's ridicule of Fox News ("We Report, You Decide"), the issue that truth is a peculiar function of the truthteller has been accepted by some but still vociferously denied by a sizable percentage of journalists and the folks who read their reportage. Jarvis is right that the blogosphere has in part helped re-legitimize the personal voice in the news, but it's hard to argue with a straight face that the so-called dinosaurs of the "Mainstream Media" haven't also done their part as well.
A prime example of this is September 11th. The blogosphere was still in its infancy when the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks happened, and the web-based newsgathering sites were all but crashed almost immediately under the strain of the added traffic of horrified and worried netizens. So to whom did we turn in our hour of need? By and large it was the major networks, who went to emergency newsgathering mode 24/7 and brought us harrowing first-person footage of the tragedy as it unfolded -- something the web still wasn't quite up to the task of delivering. Decades of conditioned objectivity broke down as familiar network anchors broke down themselves in front of a national collective audience, and for the first time in what seemed forever it was all right for a reporter to feel hurt, to feel angry, to feel sad.
So I just don't see the narrative that Jeff wants to present here of an out-of-touch elite that begins with Murrow and ends with Rather. Dan Rather's story might be an object lesson in the dangers of getting exactly what you wish for, but is there a deeper truth about the conflict between old and new media as the champions of the latter so passionately believe? I don't think so. Rather was so eager to "nail" the Bush Administration on the issue of Dubya's dubious National Guard record that he didn't vet the Killian memo with the requisite amount of due diligence customarily, nor did CBS News, who foolishly allowed themselves to trust their veteran anchor even when behaving in an irresponsible fashion.
How this couldn't have happened twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago is a question that I don't think has been considered by the new media's acolytes. Forgeries are hardly a new concept, nor is that of the amateur sleuth or debunker. It seems to me that Dan Rather would have gone down in flames by telegraph or carrier pigeon just as easily as he did by the internet. Perhaps the nature of the blogosphere accelerated the pace of the scandal unfolding, but surely the end result would have been the same no matter what the medium, unless the argument being made here was that the human race is much less credulous and forgiving as a species than it used to be -- something I highly doubt.
Mind you, I understand what Jeff Jarvis is trying to get at, but his own conception of the evolution of journalism is understandably colored by a teleological bias that makes the new media an unavoidable result of the old's failings. And it just doesn't work. Truth be told, the relationship between the new and old media is an extremely complicated one -- how can it not be, when you have journalists who blog and bloggers who report as journalists? Far from one destroying the other, it is the very infrastructure of the one that makes the other possible. Just as my colleagues in the library science world who bemoan the passing of the print book as the end of their profession miss the point that librarianship has survived the transition from clay tablets to papyrus rolls to parchment codices to movable type, so too are the digital journalists kidding themselves by thinking that a change of medium signifies a quantum shift in basic nature.
Which brings me back to Spider Jerusalem. While Jarvis is correct in pointing out that the internet is a terribly fragmented medium right now that is not at all conducive to producing the blogosphere equivalent of an Ed Murrow (or even a Dan Rather), let us remember that this is an extremely young technology. It took an entire generation to get from the first television broadcasts in the 1920's to an icon of the medium such as Murrow. Who's to say how the new media will coalesce over the next twenty-odd years? It seems unlikely that we will continue to fly apart in all directions from now until the end of time. Surely the blogosphere, which already has its "A-List", will eventually produce its first bonafide Spider Jerusalem -- a voice that becomes synonymous with the medium itself, as Murrow did in his own time. Some may argue that Instapundit has already done just that, but he's less of a journalist and more of a portal, as are Atrios, The Daily Kos, and the other major players currently on the table.
But someone will break through. It's only a matter of time. And when it finally does happen, let's hope for more Murrow and less Spider!
(And you haven't already read Warren Ellis' celebrated comic series Transmetropolitan, which chronicles the journalistic adventures of Spider Jerusalem, then how can you call yourself a proper member of the blogosphere?)
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