I found out that Dr. Duncan Black (aka Atrios) was speaking at nearby Grinnell College at 8pm last night, so I drove out to see him. I got there a bit late, and walked into a well-attended symposium. The topic was "Trench Warfare: Narratives-Modern Media." I arrived just as he started talking about what prompted him to start a blog.
I noted, wryly, that Judith Miller had given a symposium—"Cooperate/Jail -Journalism Ethic Dilemma"—in the same room at 4:30. Missed it.
The audience was receptive, and there were a lot of questions afterward. Writeup below the fold.
Dr. Black explained that he wanted to provide a liberal voice, however small, in the then-predominantly conservative and libertarian blogosphere. At one point, he called Eschaton "middle C on the mighty Casio" that was the liberal message machine. Then David Brock offered him a job at Media Matters.
He spun his description of the media landscape from the two points of view offered by his blog and his job. MMFA is concerned with correcting counterfactual conservative narrative, while Eschaton is more concerned with building a liberal narrative around the news of the day. Thus:
People do not get their news from journalists. They get their news indifferently from journalists and various narrators, whether reporters, blogs, pundits, think-tank "experts," actual experts, friends and co-workers, talk-show blowhards, and "perhaps most importantly," late-night comedians. This is by design. There are innumerable shows where they are all jumbled together, with no clear identification that so-and-so is a reporter, and so-and-so works for a conservative advocacy group, and so-and-so is simply a loose cannon. Reporters and partisan pundits are placed on the same roundtables to talk about issues. This practice is a pet peeve of his, because the reporters are restricted to prevailing narrative, in order to appear objective, whereas pundits can say whatever they want.
Given the state of the media, the action is in composing, maintaining and controlling the narrative within which ordinary people understand news and personalities. Once a narrative is established (Al Gore is dishonest, John Kerry is a flip-flopper), it is maintained regardless of whether it's factually correct. The stronger the narrative, the more any new information will be processed based on its faithfulness to the narrative. He quoted Steven Colbert arguing that while aspects of the media narrative are not factual, they are factesque, and that is sufficient. News reporting—actual journalism—merely provides the clay from which narrators cast the narrative. Whether these narrators find any given story useful determines whether it "has legs," to mix metaphors. This struggle over narrative is precisely the trench warfare in the symposium's title. Drudge, for example, does his part to set the narrative mostly by deciding which wire stories to link to. His "scoops," such as they are, are rare and unreliable.
The real reason media is concerned about bloggers, then, is that they represent more participants in the war over the mainstream narrative. Most mainstream criticism of blogs has to be seen in this light: Blogs don't generate original content? So? That's not where the action is. Blogs don't neatly distinguish between hard news, analysis, and opinion? The mainstream media doesn't either. Blogs don't have fact checkers? So long as the mainstream media defines "facts" in relation to its preferred narrative, it doesn't either. The real complaint behind these objections is that blogs present a real and symmetrical enough alternative to the media to jump right into the war and gain ground.
Dr. Black doesn't see the organization of the media as necessarily a bad thing. His main complaint is that the war to define narrative is still lopsided in favor of conservative opinion ("there is no liberal Drudge"), but his general solution to that is to continue building up the "vast left wing conspiracy." He voiced skepticism about the value of legislative solutions like the Fairness Doctrine, and he similarly doesn't see media consolidation as inherently bad.
While talking about the effects of media consolidation, he pointed out that it has gutted local news coverage. He considers this a serious loss, and a serious opportunity both for liberal narrators and for liberal activists. In response to numerous variations on the question "what can we do?", he protested that he didn't have a good answer to that question, but he always emphasized that blogs can and should fill in this gap. He then wryly noted that he doesn't do this himself, but he would if the business of keeping up with national news didn't take up all his time.
He also said that "narrative" and "spin" are essentially interchangeable, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with either one. At MMFA, he is trying to hold the conservative narrative to the facts. At Eschaton, he is trying to establish a liberal narrative based on the facts.
UPDATE: I'd spaced this while composing the post, but he also expressed bafflement at the effectiveness of outraged reader mail in swaying media outlets. He was particularly aghast at the effectiveness of what he called "outrage machines"—the web forms that email a pregenerated rant with minimal to no customization with the click of a button. He'd like any targeted media outlets to "grow a spine" and listen to criticism, but ignore mere outrage.
The messages I took home from the symposium were:
- The role blogs play in reacting to news is critically important, to the extent that it helps to shape the way that ordinary people react to the news.
- If you want to contribute to the liberal message as an individual, focus on local news and politics that your local Gannett satellite isn't covering or covering well.