CHARLOTTESVILLE - Citizens and journalists gathered in the University's Nau Hall last Saturday to discuss the future of citizenship and journalism in this country. The event, a screening of the movie "Page One: Inside The New York Times," preceded a panel that featured Media Studies Prof. Siva Vaidhyanathan, McGregor McCance of The Daily Progress and Brian Stelter, a media writer for the Times and co-star of "Page One." "I've seen it about 10 times," Stelter tweeted, "but I no longer watch, I just walk in at the end." Stelter, a tweeter and former blogger, took his seat as scheduled.
Questions were raised about the feasibility of print media and the role of journalism today. "We also have to ask big questions, as this documentary does, about our ability to make sense of the world and make sense of our own country," Vaidhyanathan said. "Because institutions we thought were as stable and secure as any in the country seem to be shaken to the core."
In his 2006 book "The Wealth of Networks," Yochai Benkler fleshes out many of the questions that were implicitly suggested by this movie and panel. Making a distinction between the mass media dominant in the 20th century and what he calls the "networked information economy," Benkler finds, "One need not adopt the position that the commercial mass media are somehow abusive, evil, corporate-controlled giants, and that the Internet is the ideal Jeffersonian republic in order to track a series of genuine improvements" in the potential platform for a public sphere.
Departing from Benkler, the first point to be made is that Internet-based sources of information appear inherently conventional. Wikipedia does not originate new knowledge, but aggregates claims researched elsewhere. Sites like The Huffington Post collect reporting done by papers like the Times. This claim is all sorts of wrong, however, as websites like HuffPo and Gawker Media provide legitimate and original news articles. One might add that a traditional journalist - from the Times, say - never generates the news, but likewise synthesizes information from other sources.
The next argument regarding newspapers has a corollary best seen in the movies. Since everyone can already, easily, produce and upload videos - a director to each monitor and actor to every screen - why see something like "Page One" at all? Newspapers, or Hollywood studios, will say that only they have the sort of physical and human infrastructure to make a better product; that only a corporation can provide an economic incentive to best motivate a paid staff. This claim seems untrue - it appears inaccurate to say that the promise of a monetary pay-off guarantees a more competent product. The Cavalier Daily, for instance, consists almost entirely of unpaid student volunteers.
But there is something to this point, which is brought up in "Page One" as well. However diverse the sources made available by individual bloggers or peer-produced journalistic projects, newspapers can cover areas otherwise off-limits or plainly uninteresting. A newspaper can station staffers on beats, thus anticipating the news where others will only come after the fact.
Yet it would be a weak claim for newspapers to justify their journalistic role by means of their having a hunch for covering the right place at the right time. Anywhere a paper can go, can a blog go as well? In what regions do newspapers report where no one else can?
Newspapers, of course, can cover themselves, and "Page One" is salient not only because it reminds us that the functioning of a newspaper is itself newsworthy, but because it reflects the sort of transparency that the Times allows. "[T]here is an openness of perspective that enables the events to unfold without prejudging the outcome," remarked Peter Osnos in his movie review in The Atlantic, the same magazine featured in "Page One" for having boldly forecast the Times' collapse in January 2009.
Benkler, in "The Wealth of Networks," asserts that "The two basic critiques of commercial mass media coalesce on the conflict between journalistic ethics and the necessities of commercialism." It was this concern specifically that I shared with the panel last Saturday. Asked about the difficulties of a newspaper giving its realistic financial outlook while maintaining consumer confidence, Stelter answered, "This filmmaker [Andrew Rossi] had full access, and there was no editorial restrictions put on him. When I had to write about the buyouts and the layoffs at The New York Times a month ago, I did it with the same rigor that anybody else would put on any other company." For Stelter, The Times' continued transparency is "how we're going to keep people's trust and win their trust back."
It is a banal claim to make, as many digital utopians do, that a collective of peer-producers could identically perform these journalistic functions. Of course they could. Only it wouldn't be The New York Times.
Some critics were frustrated that "Page One" hovers over seemingly unconnected events in the paper's past, such as the 2003 plagiarism scandal involving Jayson Blair and the faulty reporting of Judith Miller on the Iraq War. But the point is that these historical examples are necessary to assess how the Times has dealt with, transparently in some instances, less so in others, its own internal dilemmas. That we have learned of The Times' follies mainly from its own pages puts the paper in either a win-win, or lose-lose, situation, wherein every self-reported instance of fraud either serves to build up or tear down the trust we hold in it.
One could say a newspaper's ability to report on itself is only further evidence of the protracted dominance of the mass media. In the newly digital economy, who cares how old newspapers perform? But the notion of trust, or accountability, is inherently historical: There is little confidence for new institutions in journalism, not because they are less capable, but because they have no history. This is not a conventionalist, or anti-Jeffersonian point: It is not to say that on account of its history The New York Times should be excluded from replacement. But neither can any account of replacing The New York Times exclude its history.
It is not sentimental to treat corporations, if not legally, then emotionally, as persons; otherwise the notion of "trust" makes little sense. Nor need one take the anti-capitalist stance that loyalty to a company is inherently bad, and the question of whether The New York Times goes under, I think, ought to involve a component of whether people think it should.
Aaron Eisen is an Opinion Editor for The Cavalier Daily.
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