Flipping my 16 basic cable channels the other night, I stumbled by sheer luck across David Simon (producer of The Wire, genius) giving testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet Hearing on the Future of Journalism. He gives a stunning report to John Kerry and the rest of the committee on the fate of journalism after the internet. He makes a great point about the inability of the amateur blog to perform anything more than repetition and aggregation, thus leaving the critical role of journalism in holding public officials accountable unfulfilled at the present time:
Understand here that I am not making a Luddite argument against the internet and all that it offers. But democratized and independent though they may be, you do not – in my city — run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at City Hall, or in the courthouse hallways or at the bars and union halls where police officers gather. You do not see them consistently nurturing and then pressing sources. You do not see them holding institutions accountable on a daily basis.
Why? Because high-end journalism – that which acquires essential information about our government and society in the first place — is a profession; it requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending. For a relatively brief period in American history – no more than the last fifty years or so – a lot of smart and talented people were paid a living wage and benefits to challenge the unrestrained authority of our institutions and to hold those institutions to task. Modern newspaper reporting was the hardest and in some ways most gratifying job I ever had. I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying or from whom they are withholding information. The idea of this is absurd, yet to read the claims that some new media voices are already making, you would think they need only bulldoze the carcasses of moribund newspapers aside and begin typing. They don’t know what they don’t know – which is a dangerous state for any class of folk – and to those of us who do understand how subtle and complex good reporting can be, their ignorance is as embarrassing as it is seemingly sincere. Indeed, the very phrase citizen journalist strikes my ear as nearly Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.
Also, if you haven’t seen Simon’s hour-long interview with Bill Moyers, check that out here.
After the fifth season of The Wire — and, incidentally, having just seen State of Play the other day — I wonder if Simon’s language mirrors others’ to the extent that “blogging” equals “unpaid nonprofessional non-reporting.” Because part of the sense I get from Simon in his interviews and his work is that the physicality of the newspaper and the newspaper room (and the fact that you have to pay to read it) is part of the essence of journalism. But is all of that true? Is it possible for “blogging” to have room for serious journalistic reporting by trained professionals who are paid to do so, who work together with others, who get sources and all the rest?
I guess it’s a question of how much of the “old system” we think is essential and how much of the “new system” (which everyone calls “blogging”) is inherently different, as well as what we mean by our language.
Anyway, thanks for the link. Simon is always worth listening to.
Brad, I think there are two points that Simon makes that are worth repeating.
The blog has yet to come up with a means by which to conduct investigative journalism. This is not to say that it is impossible for internet-based news sources to do so. They just haven’t done it yet. The blogs people read either point to news stories somebody else does (the Daily Dish, Eschaton, Matthew Yglesias, etc.) or are basically op-ed pages (Stanley Fish’s NYT blog). News sources like Slate have some great things to say, but they are based on information that is universally accessible – it’s not like they’re about to break the next Watergate, you know?
Also, the point about institutional wisdom seems also very important. How can individual bloggers learn the way young journalists used to from the accumulated know-how of the old-school newspapermen? How to develop trusted sources, which city officials are full of shit, etc. The point rather might ought to be that bloggers don’t do any of this stuff – they don’t work with sources, they don’t go to council meetings, and they don’t follow local issues at all.
Does Simon also theoblog?