ARTICLE: Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

[Ryan Goble]

Read this in the April 2011 Atlantic -"Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media" by James Fallows .... some of the things I highlighted...

There are many reasons Carter lost that election to Ronald Reagan; a prime interest rate of 20 percent during the spring symbolized economic problems that might have been sufficient to do him in. But “America Held Hostage” surely played a part. It was an early illustration of the way in which a choice about news coverage—namely, to offer a daily countdown of America’s humiliation—converted a problem into an emergency. Koppel told me that years after the hostages were released, he met Jimmy Carter at a ceremony in Washington. “President Carter said there were two people who were better off because of the hostage situation,” Koppel told me. “The ayatollah. And me.” And all of this notwithstanding Koppel’s role as one of the most serious and sophisticated broadcast journalists of his day.

The point is not to debunk the greats but to say that the noble parts of golden-age journalism were not its only parts. The most famous play about American journalism, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page, is set in a courthouse press room in the 1920s, when reporters swaggered rather than cowered. But its ethics are straight from what many think of as the Gawker playbook: reporters bribe sources, editors hype whatever lurid story will draw a crowd, no one gets too haughty about the “responsibility” of the press. Richard Hofstader’s seminal works about unreason and misinformation in American public affairs, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, appeared in the early 1960s and were hardly respectful of the journalism of that time.

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“It’s not so much that American public life is more idiotic,” Jill Lepore said, referring to both press coverage and the public discussion it spawns. “It’s that so much more of American life is public. I think that goes a long way to explaining what seems to be a ‘decline.’ Everything is documented, and little of it is edited. Editing is one of the great inventions of civilization.”

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At an individual level, I think the “distracted Americans” scare will pass. Either people who manage to unplug, focus, and fully direct their attention will have an advantage over those constantly checking Facebook and their smart phone, in which case they’ll earn more money, get into better colleges, start more successful companies, and win more Nobel Prizes. Or they won’t, in which case distraction will be a trait of modern life but not necessarily a defect. At the level of national politics, America is badly distracted, but that problem long predates Facebook and requires more than a media solution.

Read the full article HERE.