There’s a fascinating but little-noted conversation going on between Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times and Jeff Jarvis, proprietor of a seminal and influential blog, Buzzmachine.com.
It’s taking place at Jarvis’ blog, and it all started with Jarvis complaining that the Times makes light of too many bloggers in too many stories. It picks up today with this response from Keller:
I regard the blogosphere as both a treasury from which we draw ideas and information, and a stimulating bull session where our work lives on. It’s only natural that in the blogosphere, a medium with a very low threshold, you find a lot of self-indulgent nonsense, misinformation, propaganda and paranoia. But I have an equally long and more unforgiving list of complaints about the more traditional media. My quarrel with the blog world, to the extent I have one, is really with the zealots — the people whose pose is revolutionary, whose articles of faith are that All Information Must Be Free (as if we should stop paying Dexter Filkins to risk his life in Iraq) and that Editing Is Evil (abolish those fact-checking departments and copy desks and let the Truth emerge organically from the collision of blogs) and so on. My anxiety about the blog world is not that it will put us out of business but that it contributes to an erosion of middle ground, that it accelerates a general polarization of the nation into people, right and left, who are ardently convinced and not very interested in exposing themselves to facts or ideas that contradict their prejudices.
Jarvis, a romantic if ever there was one, replies:
Certainly, I understand misapprehension about the zealots of online who collect at the edges. They’re unpleasant bunches, yet they do not represent their fellow bloggers any more than squeegee men represent their fellow New Yorkers or local radio-news hacks their fellow journalists.
I’ll argue instead that it is big media who have, to use your words, accelerated “a general polarization of the nation into people, right and left….” Who is trading on the notion that we are suddenly a land of red v. blue but big media? … Big media have made division the key narrative of the age.
So next I’ll argue that by allowing a wide variety of opinions and perspectives to find voice online, blogs can improve the discourse and will help us reclaim that middle ground. The national debate is not served by homogenizing discussion and disagreement into the one-size-fits-all package that big media has had to become or into the one-from-column-A/one-from-column-B teetering balance of cable news. Don’t we often say, nostalgically, that towns were better served when they had many newspapers of differing views serving varied audiences? Isn’t that what blogs resurrect: the cacophony of the town square?
… Bloggers already know well how to take advantage of the reporting and editing of big media; the work of reporters is our link blood. Both camps need to acknowledge the value of the other and recognize that, indeed, their common enemy is zealotry and ignorance. That’s my hope.
As any careful reader knows, we have not, over the months, been especially kind to “big media” or to the New York Times. Indeed, our reason for being is to track them and to call them out when they take shortcuts, or ignore the obvious, or play into the hands of political or corporate spin doctors. But in this instance, we’ll argue that Keller is on the money, and that Jarvis ignores the obvious: It is the fringe extremes of the political blogosphere — in particular the bloodthirsty headhunters of right and left — that currently command the stage and that shove the thoughtful middle ground into oblivion.
Ask Dan Rather … or “Jeff Gannon” … or Eason Jordan … or the next media or political body swinging from the next rope.
To us, that recalls a long history of the “town square,” written by mobs, of which no one can be proud — not even Jarvis.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.