Media and Power

I went to town with the first week’s readings – my bad.

David Leigh’s Article “Are reporters doomed?” sets up an opposition between “new media” and “traditional reporting,” the former of which, Leigh suggests, threatens to destroy the latter. Leigh defines traditional media as media which maintain a set of values practiced by veterans. Traditional media is also in a position of power, “but the power of reporting does not lie entirely — or even mostly — in the nobility of its practitioners, or their professional skills,” Leigh writes. “It also lies in the preservation of media outlets that are themselves powerful.” Leigh sees traditional media under threat by new media or citizen journalism, which may destabilize traditional media’s position of power. “That is perhaps one of the biggest dangers of the media revolution. When the media fragment — as they will — and splinter into a thousand websites, a thousand digital channels, all weak financially, then we will see a severe reduction in the power of each individual media outlet. The reporter will struggle to be heard over the cacophony of a thousand other voices.” Leigh's writing almost comes across as red scare propaganda! Financial power, Leigh argues, is the means of gaining and retaining power, and the fragmentation caused by the new “media revolution” are more threatening because they are “all weak financially.” Leigh is then suggesting a direct correlation between the varying levels of power in the media and the financial status of each of these positions of power. To this end, it comes across as if traditional media is only powerful insofar as fits within the framework of those in financial power.

Nicholas Lemann’s piece “The Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists,” published in The New Yorker, sets out by asking the question, “what has citizen journalism actually brought us?” The first positive influence Lemann suggests new media is endowed with is it’s democratization of the “media oligarchy” that Leigh so compellingly pleas for to remain in power:

In their Internet versions, most traditional news organizations make their reporters available to answer readers’ questions and, often, permit readers to post their own material. Being able to see this as the advent of true democracy in what had been a media oligarchy makes it much easier to argue that Internet journalism has already achieved great things.

Lemann also makes a second point about new media:

The most memorable photographs of the London terrorist bombing last summer were taken by subway riders using cell phones, not by news photographers, who didn’t have time to get there. There were more ordinary people than paid reporters posting information when the tsunami first hit South Asia, in 2004, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, in 2005, and when Israeli bombs hit Beirut this summer. I am in an especially good position to appreciate the benefits of citizen journalism at such moments, because it helped save my father and stepmother’s lives when they were stranded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

In other words, citizen journalism is effective for the immediacy with which it provides information. Traditional media are then reliant upon the citizens immediately affected by any one particular story. As Lemann writes, however, “over time, the best information about why the hurricane destroyed so much of the city came from reporters, not citizens.” This would suggest a supplanting of the discourse of those affected by the news to a dominant discourse of those affecting the resulting fallout of the initial news (i.e. those in power).

Our final reading, Adam Penenberg’s “The New Old Journalism” revealed a reactionary tendency apparent in all three articles. Just as Leigh called for a kind of “slow journalism” in the face of citizen journalism, Penenberg says the fundamental values of traditional reporting have never been more important when faced by the new media. It’s as if all three commentators grow excited about new media, taking it to its “revolutionary” verge, but then pull back in reaction and actually call for a greater emphasis on traditional forms of journalism.