The Little Tent

Doug Fisher at Common Sense Journalism draws attention to an essay by James Fallows in the Atlantic on why we should come to Love the New Media. As the headline deck puts it: "There isn't any point in defending the old ways. Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media -- and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future."

(As a copy editor, always gotta love that phrasing "may also be." When I used to do headline seminars for Knight Ridder, one of my targets was any headline with "may" in it. It might be the best you could do, but that headline by definition could also be written as: "Or it may not." "Dow may hit 34,000, or it may not." If it stands for "largely unsupported speculation -- by respected and knowledgeable sources, however -- on a subject everyone's interested in," what can you do? It's the story you were given. If it simply indicates "story has no point," then you've got a bigger problem.)

OK, this is the same James Fallows who famously preached that Japan was going to overtake America, although with enough ahems, caveats, and shuffles that he could also fairly say, no, I merely presented this as a possible outcome. It is his style to do lots of reporting in seemingly foreign parts, then find a conclusion that's way out in front of everyone else, because -- well, most of us in journalism know who James Fallows is, right? You don't get attention by totally reasoned responses, as Barack Obama continues to refuse to learn. Fallows notes that 15 years ago, a book he wrote said "scandal, spectacle, and the 'game' of politics was driving citizens away from public affairs, making it harder for even the least cynical politicians to do an effective job, and at the same time steadily eroding our public ability to assess what is happening and decide how to respond." He now says that's still true, but what's the point of fighting it? The new media have won.

This is basically an overheated article about Gawker, and in justifying its approach, he says this, which of course is true: "Giving people what they want as opposed to what they should want is a conflict as old as journalism, certainly as it has been practiced in this country. My capsule history of journalism is that for more than a century after the Civil War, American readers and viewers were in various ways buffered from getting exactly what they wanted from newspapers and, later, radio and TV news shows. News, like education, aspired to be as interesting as possible but to have an uplifting civic intent." (Like all of culture. Read the book "The Judgment of Paris" to see the battle between the Academie des Beaux-Arts and the impressionists on this very point.) And then he shows how we in journalism have tried to have an uneasy balance of both: Drawing an audience with bells and whistles, but not so many bells and whistles that they would damage our self-proclaimed status as rational men and women above trying to attract people with bells and whistles. And all of this is true as well.

Then, in the "Japan will overtake us" manner of reaching a fixed outcome from a current trend, he writes: "Of course, there will for a long time be a range of publications, all of them subject to the new market pressures but each having its own conception of its culture and the 'brand,' the reputation and audience it can deliver to advertisers. But existing American media operations must become slightly if steadily more like the Gawkers of the business — we’re doing it right here, at the magazine Ralph Waldo Emerson and company founded before the Civil War — and new operations will grow up knowing no other environment."

For journalists and their self-conceits, however, the next part of the essay is very useful -- reminding us that Henry Luce and Brit Haddon were once seen as Gawker, and that our culture is still in thrall to something that ought to have a name -- the Richie Cunningham fallacy, perhaps? -- the idea that 1950s America should be normative rather than an outlier. He finally draws some conclusions, which are well worth reading. But I think one cannot go unchallenged, and not just because it quotes, inevitably, Jeff Jarvis:

"American life is becoming more polarized, and this is a phenomenon bigger than whatever is happening in the media. But the separate spheres of political discussion — Hannity for some people, Maddow for others — may be less of an emergency than is often assumed. 'Government is not life,' Jeff Jarvis, a Time Inc. veteran and the founder of Entertainment Weekly, who now teaches journalism at the City University of New York, told me. 'The fact that people want to ignore it is okay.' In this view, the political class, fascinated by the process of campaigning and strategizing, dominates the media, imposes its obsession on the public at large, and worries when citizens don’t share its passion.

“'The people who are mainly interested in politics are crazy in a way,” Denton (of Gawker) told me. 'Maybe I’d rather reach people whose first passion is video games, or fashion, or are retirees or young professional women. Their interest in politics is the normal interest in politics, not as the main source of rage and resentment in their lives or to the exclusion of everything else.' The targeting of such communities, ever easier with social media, is not an answer to America’s polarization. But it does suggest the possibility of new, complex connections that offset a stark right/left divide."

It does if you are determined to make lemonade. It may portend the death of the two-party system, which may or may not be a bad thing, genuflections toward the late David Broder, that towering believer in compromise and the middle who died this week, aside. But politics is not simply the same as a mall, where if the department stores are gone, an ever-larger group of big boxes and boutiques can supply the customers' needs, possibly more efficiently than when the Big Store was trying to satisfy all.

I'm not a religious person, but I occasionally play around with, what if I were to go back? Sure would be nice sometimes to be able to say, "I'm letting Him take charge of that one." But churches today don't seem to be the religious department stores they were in the Richie Cunningham fallacy era -- come in, take a pew, listen to music and words, put some money in the till, go and serve the Lord, see you next Sunday. It is an increasing expectation that you are joining a like-minded community -- not the imposing Gothic building near your house -- and will participate in Stephen ministries and feeding the hungry and marriage retreats, if not Wednesday night basketball games. If you're not interested in that -- well, there's no cultural requirement in America any longer that one be a member of a church. (One still has to believe in God to be fully accepted, but one can simply cite "faith" as one's method of worship.) So the churches become more about, and oriented to, those who really believe.

Everything's optional in life now -- except politics. Politics is still a single-class tournament like Indiana high school basketball used to be -- everyone's got a chance, and everyone's in the end watching. If politics becomes simply a video game or NFL for its obsessives, it will fall into the hands of those who look to it for "rage and resentment." For, as we're all learning, what the new media are about is emotional connection. Perhaps, as Fallows hopes, the answer to Fox News is The Daily Show -- and the answer to The Daily Show is Fox News -- and from this a better commonwealth will arise, one in which alternating stories based on some level of truthiness create opposed-yet-cooperating communities as the media used to feel existed in Congress.

Fallows thinks we have to believe this, because it's coming regardless and we should hope for the best. But when politics becomes simply another genre interest, such as fashion or football, we can forget that we can wear denim shirts and ignore all sports, but we can't not be citizens of our country. If we decide we aren't, those on the extremes will gladly make the decisions for us. One has to hope that American common sense will prevail as always -- but American common sense was always supported by prominent figures coughing, saying "harrumph," and, yes, writing articles sometimes vacuously saying "while facts are hard to come by, it appears more and more people may be...," all possibly full of holes but all existing to nudge people who Don't Care All That Much toward the middle road. Take those away, and it is a new-media world indeed.

An International Non-Daily Newspaper

As noted here on July 8 -- noted many other places far earlier -- the Christian Science Monitor will become a weekly in print in April 2009. As noted here on July 8, and noted many other places today, the decision of the Monitor has very little to do with the rest of the newspaper business. The paper was nationally distributed by mail, which meant that it closed at some unheard-of time in the afternoon. (Maybe even the morning.) It had almost no advertising. It existed, and will continue to exist, because it was the will of Mary Baker Eddy that it exist. And it carried proudly the name of a church that has a relatively small (and generally believed to be declining) number of adherents, always leading to confusion about exactly what it was.

Had the Monitor been a for-profit business, or even a break-even business, it would have been closed years ago after the debacles of Monitor Radio and the dismissal of Kay Fanning as editor. The paper's management had no clear idea how (or apparently any desire) to effectively compete in the print newspaper business in the 1980s; it is no wonder they have no wish to do so in 2009. Functioning as essentially an online news service will be a better deal for the Monitor, its readers, and Christian Science.

One must, of course, make a sad bow of nostalgia for what the Monitor was in the 1950s and 1960s -- one of the foremost proponents of true journalism at a time when newspapers were just starting to cease to be organs of bias or tawdry sensation. Of course, it was not the example of the Monitor that drove them to this; it was the collapse of competing newspapers in the mass economy of the 1950s, the end of evening newspapers in the wake of TV, and the fact that TV could always be more sensational than newspapers. But the Monitor showed editors across the country how professional, intelligent journalism could be done.

For someone growing up in Indiana in the 1960s, when the Pulliam papers basically anointed our governor, Roger Branigin, as a "favorite son" for their own purposes, and largely refused to cover Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign, the simple existence of quality newspapers like the Monitor and the Louisville Courier-Journal meant that the world as defined by the Star and the News was not the entire world.

It is not hard in the media environment of 2008 to imagine biased journalism; it is far more prevalent today than it was in 1968, if you take everything purporting to be breaking or commenting upon news as journalism. It is hard to imagine how there simply were so few outlets for political discourse. Robert Kennedy won the Indiana Democratic primary despite the Star and the News ignoring him, so it is not that they had a stranglehold upon the voters. They did try, when they wanted to, to have a stranglehold upon the political movers and shakers, which was far more important locally. Your political career could be derailed by an unfavorable comment from Ed Ziegner or Michael Padev; the City Council could be told to back off in a column by Mickey McCarty. The papers and their owner could have some control over whom the political movers and shakers were and thus control what was put forward for debate. Now you have many, many people attempting to do the same thing, all presenting what they call journalism. At least back then, you could read between the lines and find out what you were supposed to know and supposed to not know. It may have been Pravda, but you could learn how to read Pravda. Now you have no idea how much you have to read. And because the Star and News had to cover everything, they couldn't make everything in the paper biased. The Huffington Post can ignore whatever inconvenient facts it wants.

I am sure the Monitor of its day had myriad faults -- it was delivered by mail then, with later deadlines, meaning, I am sure, that it came to most readers a day late -- but partisanship was not among them. My hope is that the Monitor can be successful online as the sort of force it was founded to be, and for decades was nationally respected as in print -- a clear-eyed antidote to misleading partisanship in reporting news. But while it claims a large online readership -- hell, what paper doesn't claim a large online readership? If I click on one headline in Romenesko and stop reading after the second graf I become one of the Washington Post's online readers. The Monitor was founded in the context of print newspapers. I suspect its true online equivalent will come from that world and not from the past.

Wade Into the Water

One wades into politics at one's own peril. But this will get back to newspapers.

You would think that Sarah Palin's nomination would have ended the Mommy Wars: Yes, you can be the mother of five children and have a full-time job, such as governor or vice president. Wasn't that what the Mommy Wars were about: Working moms vs. nonworking moms?

Well, at least it was when I was younger. Clearly even "working full-time at an important job" has been removed from the equation, as this story from the New York Times makes clear. So one is left with: What are we talking about, anyway? What were we talking about?

Some quotes:

• “I admire her intelligence and I admire her integrity, but first and foremost she’s a mom, and she has an understanding of what being a mom is.”


• “I’m just going to vote for Trig Van Palin’s mom.”


• “Sarah Palin is a different kind of feminist. She is a strong woman who can wear a skirt and be proud of it.”

I'm thinking back to the 1960s and what 1960s feminism was fighting. "Don't you worry your little head about it." Get married, and you lost your job. Unequal pay for equal work. Differences in legal treatment that I was too young to understand. Harassment in law school and medical school. A woman couldn't possibly be smart enough or rational enough to be president. A woman's only place is in the home. Your son can dream of being a doctor and your daughter can dream of being a nurse. The whole plot of "Mad Men."

It seems that in that sense, 1960s feminism in the end got four fruits across the slot machine and you can hear the silver dollars hitting the tray. So why is intelligent, successful, educated Hillary Clinton, who even her foes generally admit successfully raised a fine daughter, seen as a man-hating b---- and intelligent, successful, educated Sarah Palin, who has also raised fine children but has the unfortunate situation of having a daughter pregnant out of wedlock at 17, a wonderful example for our daughters?

I guess it has to be the cookies. I've often wondered if Hillary Clinton taped herself into a circle of hell by saying "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life." In that statement a lot of people heard: Come hell or high water, I'm a lawyer first, I'm a politician first. I may also be a wife, I may also be a mother, but my stars are set and I follow them. My personal ambitions are high and they come first.

And Sarah Palin? I may be governor, I could be vice president, but come hell or high water, I'm a woman first, I'm a mom first. I suppose I could have stayed home, but what I decided to do was enter politics full-time, but I bake cookies and I can have the other moms over for tea and not feel like my identity as a politician or an intelligent person is threatened. I was female before I entered public life, and those stars were set and I followed them. My personal ambitions are high, but being a woman brings certain responsibilities and I have them whether I want them or not.

In part this is an age difference -- Hillary Clinton had to fight and win battles so that Sarah Palin would not have to -- but it's a class difference as well. And although Palin worked as a journalist before entering politics, she didn't follow Al Gore into the city room of the Tennessean; she was a sports reporter on Anchorage television. That reflects changing times, but it also reflects the class divide that exists between print and TV journalism on the local level. As the New York Times story said of Wasilla, Alaska: “You’ve got to remember, we are not much bigger than a high school and she is the homecoming queen.” Print newsrooms have very few homecoming queens or BMOCs.

As Mark Bowden said in his Atlantic article, the journalists who entered the field in the heady era of Vietnam, Watergate and civil rights viewed themselves as "arbiters of style, taste and decency, who took upon themselves the tasks of keeping government honest and educating the public." That's slightly different from informing the public. Educating the public as arbiters means: We not only know more than you about what's going on -- which is our job, to find it out and tell you -- we know how we should live. We showed you the evil of Bull Connor, we showed you the truth of Martin Luther King, and you elected Lester Maddox, Frank L. Rizzo and Charles Stenvig. We showed you what was happening in Vietnam, and you re-elected Richard Nixon. We showed you how women were being discriminated against, and you bought Marabel Morgan. We are disappointed. So we're just going to keep showing you until you get it right.

I remember reading a story in my hometown paper years ago, a long interview with a woman who lived on Spring Mill Road, in a very upscale section of Indianapolis. She was in her late 70s, I believe, her husband had just died, and she wanted to tell her story. Her husband had physically mistreated her, but that was not all of it. He had made her give up contact with her friends. He had had her sit home during the day so she could be instantly attentive to his needs when he arrived. She regretted her life. She wanted younger women to learn from her example. Asked why she had put up with it, why she had not left, her response was: That was what women of my generation were told we had to do. That was our role as women.

The feminist women of my era said: Being female does not mean we have to fulfill any special role. We can do whatever we want. We can choose what we will do. The women who see Palin as their champion say, we can do whatever we want, we can choose what we will do, as long as we also celebrate our roles as women. I think that's why the stories that drive conservatives mad tend not to be about income redistribution or worker's rights or drilling for oil. They're the ones in which journalists look like sociologists investigating the primitive culture of those who say the desires of the individual should be at least balanced against, if not subordinated to, community standards.

Many people I know in newspapers are saying: You hypocrites! You cut funds for sex education, you preach abstinence only, and then Bristol gets pregnant and you say: Well, it's OK. If you just acknowledged that kids are going to have sex, we could be realistic and avoid some of these problems. To which comes the retort: You preach what is right, and then you support the sinner. You tell your kids what to do, and then you love them when they don't do it. But you say there is a right. A community can't exist without there being the "right," but the outliers of "right" will move around. Eisenhower said that America's system of government made no sense without there being a God, but it was to some degree irrelevant who that God was.

Many newspaper folks, with their curiosity, their desire to tell everyone's story, their desire to be reportorial and not judgmental, their belief that exposing hypocrisy shall make us free, and their general feeling that no one should be forced to do anything or denied the right to do anything because of sex, race, creed or color, simply can't understand the women who say "I'm not a feminist" and then proceed to support 95 percent of 1960s feminism's program. "I wouldn't burn my bra," when basically no one ever did. "I'm for a woman for president, but not that woman, Hillary." They see all this as a weird double standard that should be ended, a victory of cant over reality. The message that those who see Sarah Palin as their standard-bearer (and just for the record, I am not among them) come with is: A woman now can do anything she wants, but at the same time anatomy is still destiny. You can deal with any issue as well as a man can, but you still have to make the hotdish for a family funeral. You can wear the pants in your family as long as you don't think it's wrong to wear a skirt. Every circle doesn't have to be completely squared. It will be interesting to see if newspapers see this as progress or reaction.