Last weekend, I came across the following quote: “There is something happening in the world of art today. There are people who some think are new idols, new grand personalities. A lot of people resent the fact that these people are saying critical things, penetrating things. But it’s not idolatry, it’s the most positive, most affirmative aspect of our nation today.”
It’s the kind of bold, self-aggrandizing statement that you can find daily in the blogosphere, whether it’s from Andrew Sullivan, Hugh Hewitt, Kos, Glenn Reynolds or James Wolcott. And it might have come in handy for Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia’s irrelevant Graduate School of Journalism, who wrote an incredibly lazy article in the Aug. 7 issue of The New Yorker (“Amateur Hour”) about “citizen journalists,” in trying to prove his point.
Actually, the person who, however inarticulately, said those words was Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary), back in 1963 at the Newport Folk Festival upon introducing singer Phil Ochs.
There’s a case to be made that the Internet is clogged with far too many delusional blowhards who really believe that their blogs are irrevocably altering the media landscape, but Lemann didn’t make it. Instead, perhaps trying to defend a profession, his profession, that’s been forced to adapt to new technology, Lemann criticized, in a typically condescending way, the men and women who really have made a “positive” and “affirmative” contribution to politics and popular culture.
The author cherry picks one grandiose pronouncement from Reynolds’ very readable, if strident, book An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths,” as an example of the pompous attitude too often found online. It’s doubtful that Reynolds—along with Kos, Sullivan, Hewitt and the other Internet stars—believe that they are “ordinary,” but such is mock self-deprecation that’s a tool in telling the story of the new influence people like him now possess. Lemann quotes Reynolds, a Tennessee law professor: “Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff—and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession.”
I happen to admire Reynolds’ popular InstaPundit site, not particularly for his very brief comments about news of the day, but because he provides links to opinions I might not find otherwise. Reynolds’ ludicrous notion that “millions of Americans” were, until a decade ago, in “awe” of the likes of David Broder, George Will, Thomas Friedman and Anna Quindlen, to name just a few well-read mainstream columnists, feeds into Lemann’s argument about “Amateur Hour,” but I’ll just chalk it up to provocative rhetoric.
It’s Lemann, however, who isn’t up to the challenge of making a cogent argument about the influence and potential power of the bloggers. It’s inconceivable, for example, that the dean of a journalism school and New Yorker staff writer could write a lengthy article about the web and not once mention the name of Matt Drudge. Even Frank Rich, who until a few years ago dismissed Drudge, the true pioneer of Internet power, as a “cyber gossip,” now refers to him less derisively. It could be Lemann’s in a cocoon of self-denial—even in the post-William Shawn era of The New Yorker—but it’s hard to fathom that he doesn’t realize his peers, the “professional” journalists, log onto Drudge daily.
In addition, another site that’s now a regular online stop for not only journalists—professional or amateur—but political enthusiasts and politicians as well, is Real Clear Politics, which provides a daily and non-partisan compendium of articles printed in leading newspapers and magazines, along with a comprehensive list of polling results, talk show transcripts, links and its own RCP blog, which, like the entrepreneurs who run the site, John McIntyre and Tom Bevan, tilts conservative.
In an attempt to debunk Internet journalism, Lemann compares this recent phenomenon to over 100 years ago when tabloid king William Randolph Hearst sold millions of newspapers every day. He doesn’t resort to the cliché “yellow journalism,” but it’s a reasonable guess that was his thought.
The following excerpt from “Amateur Hour” seals the case that Lemann was ill-equipped to take on Kos or Reynolds. “Most of the formal means of generating information that are familiar in America today—objective journalism is only one; others are modern academic research, professional licensing, and think tanks—were created, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explicitly to counter the populist inclinations of various institutions, one of which was the big media.”
Does Lemann really think that “objective journalism” exists today? If so, he really ought to be steered away from writing about the media by New Yorker editor David Remnick. One need only to look at the front-page articles in The New York Times—Adam Nagourney, who doesn’t hide his preference for Democrats, is just the most egregious example—to see that this isn’t true. Ditto for the Washington Times’ Donald Lambro, who might be the only journalist today who thinks the Republicans might not lose Congressional seats this November, or the Associated Press, a once reputable news agency that lost its currency years ago. And let’s not even get into the bias of the British travesty known as Reuters.
Lemann does cite the blogosphere’s role in exposing Dan Rather’s bogus story on 60 Minutes in 2004 about President Bush’s National Guard Service, but it’s a glancing (and bitter) mention that understates the profound influence it had on John Kerry’s election chances. As I said, there’s a lot of bluster, wacky conspiracy theories, and ugly racial slurs (Maryland’s U.S. Senate candidate Michael Steele, a decent and bright man who’s been slimed by some bloggers for committing the sin of being a black Republican, is one prime example), to be found on the Internet, but the entire media industry has benefited from the likes of Reynolds and Kos, even if it means that the influence, and perhaps jobs, of Lemann’s dinner companions have suffered as a result.
