I post on a sports bulletin board that often veers into other topics, and I wrote the following yesterday in a discussion about the relevance of ombudsmen (I saw Jeff Jarvis use the gender-neutral "ombudsers" recently, but since I think they're dinosaurs anyway, I'll stick with the traditional usage). I seem to be covering similar ground a lot lately:
1) Ombudsmen: They were (marginally) relevant when media was strictly a one-way, broadcast channel. The media told us the way it was, we listened obediently. But sometimes they screwed up. This happened very, very rarely, because the media were "objective," but they're human and occasionally made mistakes. But no one in the audience had a platform to talk back to the media directly, so ombudsmen were invented to play that role. They were toothless pariahs in their own organizations, disliked by both the publishing and editorial sides of the house, but having them around was a price you had to pay.
Today the audience can and does speak back directly. We talk among ourselves on bulletin boards, we launch our own websites, we podcast, and when the media gatekeepers deign to let us in, we comment on their own sites. There's no way an ombudsman can claim to represent my views better than I can myself, and now that I have plenty of platforms through which I can speak back to the media, the ombudsman is a superflous relic. Get rid of them all, and compel all journalists to accept responsibility for communicating directly with their audience.
2) "Objectivity": The media's pretense of "objectivity" that some people feel is being lost today was, at best, an illusion and, at worst, a shroud that masked more active agendas. Of course, we should strive to distance ourselves from preconceived ideas and emotions and seek to understand and address issues dispassionately. But we, all of us, still have those preconceived ideas and emotions, and we need to be transparent about them, rather than pretend they don't exist.
I don't lament the loss of "objectivity," and I think we're more likely to get to the truth in a post-Internet world where the diversity of voices insures that every issue will be subject to the wisdom of crowds. This is why Wikipedia works. No one of us can be completely objective or accurate, but if you get enough of us thinking and talking about an issue, an approximation of objective, accurate truth will emerge.
Will unscrupulous individuals and organizations seek to promote their biased agendas in this wide-open intellectual marketplace? Of course. But free markets work so well because they distribute information so effectively, and the true "value" of any information will be ascertained more quickly the more free the market.
3) Infotainment: The rise of infotainment and the supposed decline of more serious fare is a red herring. Hand-wringing over the tabloidization of broadcast news ignores the meteoric rise in serious exchanges being enabled by the Internet and the increasing intellectual complexity of every form of culture, from sitcoms to video games. In Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson makes a compelling argument that we're constantly getting smarter as a society and that many supposed examples of our decline are actually just the reverse: kids spend hours playing video games because they're learning incredibly complex sequences that allow them to continue playing; we flock to reality television because it taps into our wiring as social animals and challenges us to predict participants' reactions, etc.
This isn't to say that the world's just fine and dandy. But Cassandras are a dime a dozen--it's a lot more interesting to me to figure out why so many things continue to improve despite all the challenges we face.
tags: journalism ombudsmen infotainment james surowiecki wisdom of crowds steven johnson everything bad is good for you
