Dana Milbank (photo: Matthew Bradley)
Remember how corporate media’s campaign coverage used to offer wide-ranging, diverse perspectives?
Me neither. But Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank apparently thinks that’s the way the world used to work, until Twitter came along and the press corps turned into one giant exercise in groupthink.
He writes today (10/24/12) that campaign reporters have one eye on the actual debates, and one eye on social media:
This was to have been the campaign when Twitter and other social media allowed new voices to enter the debate, delivering a more diverse array of opinion and helping candidates reach beyond the media filter. In reality, social media have had the opposite effect, causing conventional wisdom to be set, simplified and amplified, faster and more pervasively–and nowhere is that more evident than in the debate coverage.
This was not the way things used to be, apparently:
Not too long ago, the wire services, broadcast networks and newspapers covered major political events differently. Each outlet had its own take and tidbits. But now everybody is operating off the same script and, except for a few ideological outliers, the product is homogenous.
I can’t say that I actually recall ever seeing any campaign coverage that looked like that. The TV networks have long been hard to distinguish–the Sunday shows book the same politicians, the same small group of pundits are sitting in the chairs of the TV studios. And well before Twitter came along, reporters were logging many hours in post-debate “spin rooms,” listening to campaign surrogates deliver talking points.
Milbank laments that “social media is discouraging people from challenging the CW”–by which he means conventional wisdom. I think a lot of people would say it’s just the opposite. Social media has enabled people who feel cut off from elite media’s narrow discussion to push issues they care about into the discussion. And social media can, in some cases, spread real-time fact checks of political rhetoric more efficiently than traditional media outlets.
From the sound of it, Milbank’s complaint is that journalists use Twitter to monitor the reactions of… other journalists like them. Which is, I suppose, a problem in that it reinforces the kind of groupthink that already exists in the press corps.
But the great thing about Twitter–or the Internet, really–is that you can sample from an array of other perspectives. Journalists who aren’t doing that, and not incorporating that diversity of views into their reporting, are making a choice. And you can’t blame that on Twitter.
There is no way journalists could have enough time to “sample from an array of other perspectives” on twitter! I follow only 50 people on twitter, and I cannot keep up with all of those tweets!
I would say that it has shown one author I chatted with some years ago at a BayCon, said we as America had a National product; Artificial stupidity. And we seemed to be number one in it’s production and shipping it around the world.
The argument that those who feel disenfranchised can feel ’empowered’ again by meeting with like, is a double edge weapon. Those like the Bachmann, and Akins and others now feel that they can export their special brand of Artificial Stupid and I see in the posts in local papers. They are people of few words, to bad they keep reusing them over and over ad nauseum with no intelligence in the positioning. It makes a monkey hashing it out on a typewriter seem intelligent and wise by comparison.
However he is a good example of what the American people believe sometimes about the past. They conveniently forget at the time, all the s–t they are yelling about, and how it was the past that so golden then. The military had similar ideal; The best duty stations (assignments in the military) were the one you just left, and the one your going to next….
Tragic but impressive to see the elites test-piloting some Antonio Gramsci. Either a dissident anti-Fascist’s idea becomes hated, or becomes interpreted in the correct Madisonian/Lenninist way.
Dana Milbank apparently longs for the time before Twitter, when journalists were freer to mold public opinion unaccountably, rather than to serve merely as a conduit of the information used by his readership to facilitate the creation their own opinion.
Dana discredits himself in an attempt to say something he thinks is cogent. The democracy of the internet is killing those who remember a time when few voices shaped all debates and returned little representative feedback.
If anything, Twitter just perpetuates the lazy journalism of the last thirty years. Gone are the days of news bureaus and investigative reporting that focused on issues rather than the day’s shiny object.
Good God, Milbank is an idiot.