Kevin Drum makes the
following observation
None of this means newspapers shouldn't be criticized. But endless broad brush howling does nothing except enable the right wing's agenda, regardless of what the howling is aimed at. If liberal bloggers were wiser, we'd spend a little more time praising our big national newspapers and a little less time shaking our fists over the fact that sometimes they aren't on our side. Our real opposition is the right wing press destruction machine, not the press itself.
What I find interesting about this thought is how similar it is to the way that Microsoft viewed the open source movement. Back in the 90s, the internet changed a lot of the rules to the software game. A large movement began online for unpaid individuals to collaborate on projects that would use this technology. Microsoft never took the threat seriously, and instead looked at the open source movement as just a bunch of angry hackers that would never accomplish anything. Eventually Linux was born and a real threat to their operating system monopoly emerged.
Because if big newspapers die, that's pretty much the end of real daily reporting in this country. That would suit the right just fine, I think, but not so much the left. We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and we shouldn't kid ourselves that constant carping -- frequently over trivial transgressions -- somehow makes the press stronger. It doesn't.
Actually, it does. Microsoft had been the clear leader in making software for a while, but it obviously wasn't perfect. And the open source movement grew to put the pressure on Microsoft to adapt to the new world. Numerous hackers, who truly did want to bring Microsoft to its knees, poked holes in their security, while the open source folks built software that was filling niches that Microsoft never saw. Microsoft didn't adapt until they got better, not when software users stopped complaining. It wasn't until they put themselves under the microscope, took care of their security issues, and finally got up to speed on internet technology.
The mainstream media must do some introspection right now, and not because idiots on the right want to kill any messenger who dares point a finger at this President. There was a time when people in the software industry believed that open source collaboration couldn't produce things that could compete with what the big companies made. They were wrong. And if the mainstream media thinks that people collaborating on the internet can't compete with them and match their quality, they'll soon be proven wrong as well. The open source movement, as chaotic as it was, allowed for a system of mass self-correction that has worked remarkably well to provide stable software and the necessary systems for addressing bugs and security fixes. There's no reason that large numbers of people, dedicated to finding the truth through a strong background in a subject, large resources available on the internet, and some critical thinking skills, can't match the efforts of those who get paid to print the truth. Especially when so many of those in the mainstream media can't seem to do it that well themselves.
As for the very real financial problems at the Times and other big newspapers, I don't know what the answer is. The reality is that television isn't going away and classified ads won't be returning to newsprint anytime soon. Is there a way to make money on the web by cooperating with bloggers, instead of locking content away from them? I don't know. But newspapers and bloggers are symbiotic at this point, and both would do well to think harder about this.
That's true. And The New York Times' decision to charge for its service is a bet that they can provide a pay service for news and opinion that can't be filled for free by others. You can bet your Firefox browsers they'll be wrong.