State of the News Media and my blog

Big (HUGE) brands of news media

Last month’s release of the State of the News Media 2009 from the PEW Project for Excellence in Journalism made me realize that I have reached a landmark in my experiment in blogging on the transition taking place in the news world.

It has been more than a year since I first conjectured to “heat up the debate between old and new media”. I laugh looking back. I cringe at the thought of reading through posts from this period of naiveté! What a simplistic view of the growing pains being felt by an entire institution of society, the decline and fall of the great empires of the fourth estate, the inevitable loss of power as described by Ibn Khaldun.

During this year, the economy has collapsed, several newspapers have moved to online-only publications, legacy news organizations have threatened to close, and I wasn’t admitted into the Ph.D. program through which I wanted to study this crisis of journalism culture. If you think that’s hard not to take personally, just consider that the San Francisco Chronicle, where I did my internship, might shutter its doors after losing US$one million a week in 2008, and The San Diego Union-Tribune, where I had my first job, was sold to some private equity firm!?

But what has shocked me most is that the discourse on which direction news media should move does not seem to be based on any particular principles, forget a coherent conceptual framework for discussion and action! This is unacceptable for a social institution meant to mirror the processes of the advancement of civilization.

Speaking of action, in truth it is with deeds not words that industry leaders will be able to learn what economic model and structure of values will carry journalism into the future. Incessant and fruitless debate has done nothing for the fields of philosophy, governance and development, and it has paralyzed the news industry as well.

Perhaps we as news women and men are too afraid of making a mistake. That paranoia is so deeply ingrained into our being as reporters and editors–once you make an error, you can’t take it back; one small mistake can cost you your career–that it has crippled our ability to learn. How else can an industry in such dire need of change evolve and mature if a degree of mistakes are not tolerated? We need to challenge this fundamental assumption in our professional ideology.

This blog is about rooting out and examining this and other assumptions. A year into recording my thoughts on the future of journalism, I feel I finally have something to offer to this discourse. I hope there will be readers and feedback.

Knowledge: mere opinion, fixed or subject to change?

Weighing that which is generally regarded as knowledge against the scales of opinion and knowledge that is either immutable or subject to correction in the future was helpful for me because these classifications directly affect how journalists portray such claims to knowledge.

It is exactly the confusion about this matter that has led to misinformation in the news media. Meanwhile, individuals have intuitively perceived that truth is not comprised of either-or absolutes and have rebelled against this dichotomous thinking by pushing a creed of relativism.

The press has an important responsibility of filtering out the zero-sum game between these two camps in its presentation of the knowledge it is meant to help generate and apply, and to assist readers in acquiring.

For example, in the presentation of scientific theories and religious convictions in the news media, it is crucial to properly convey the category of knowledge into which they fall because—as studies in almost every field have shown—these are the two systems of knowledge that have been the real progenitors of civilization. So nothing short of civilization is at stake.

To automatically present all scientific theories as immutable, incorrigible knowledge would not adequately represent the reality of the evolutionary path that science has followed, with the exception of perhaps pure mathematics. Especially in the unfolding period of transition, in which the scientific fundamentals rooted in the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview are being constantly challenged, the oversimplified science journalism seems naïve, out-of-touch, irrelevant and unreliable.

Similarly, when the majority of the world professes belief in a spiritual dimension of existence, the press—following suit with the current dominant consumerist-materialist culture—comes across as belligerent and having hidden motives in its refusal to present religious conviction as anything else than mere opinions. Meanwhile, believers consider Immutable to be one of the Names of God.

This last point is not to be argued, as debate and contention must be recognized for their worth: nothing (centuries of philosophical disputes have proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt). Instead, the point must be demonstrated in action and, with time, the proof will be irrefutable.

For those who find that hard to believe need only look to the process required for theories of racial superiority to travel the spectrum from widely accepted “incorrigible knowledge” to merely harmful opinion. We as humans have learned nothing if we have not learned that we are never done learning.

(Mortimer Adler’s Ten Philosophical Mistakes sparked this reflection.)