The shift occurred quietly (well, relatively quietly) and without a lot of fanfare. I used to read the newspaper regularly, faithfully, on almost a daily basis, for many, many years. And then one day I found that I wasn’t doing that anymore, and I didn’t need to subscribe to any papers, and I was just as informed as before. Actually I found that I was informed more fully, and for free. Huh, thought I. And also, around the country, a bunch of other subscribers were thinking huh also.
On the surface, the current administration just looks like more politics and then some. The election of Obama and his apparent belief that if lunatic policies are to be implemented, it would be best to implement them in bundles of ten at a time, has distracted us. It has kept us from seeing a cultural sea change that is, in my view, much greater than one presidential administration. When it comes to the world of news and journalism, as a sophisticated essayist might have put it, events “have been overtooken” by force majeure. But I have to go back a bit.
In the eighteenth century, the press was overtly and exuberantly partisan. There was no pretense of objectivity at all. But as the United States grew up and began acting more and more like a civilization and less and less like a frontier town, and as the forces of the Enlightenment were elbowing their way into our educated circles, journalism got respectable. We have always had pulp journalism, but over time the objectivist, “neutral” AP approach became the model of “real” journalism, and yellow journalism, however profitable, was not considered the real thing. It was still there, but it became disreputable.
But what was the funding model of this new respectable journalism? Precisely because it was respectable, and people with money subscribed to the respectable papers, the funding model became advertising. The partisanship moved from the reporting to the advertising, not forgetting the small reservation left for partisan opinions on the Op-Ed page. The funding was adequate for that time, and all papers aspired to be like the Gray Lady, The New York Times. This same mentality carried over in the establishment of the news departments of the three major networks. And thus it continued until the advent in the last ten years of the new media — blogs, news web sites, YouTube clips, and so on. I mean, think about this for a minute.
And so the mainstream media is now sucking air — and the reasons for this have been obvious. Their pretence of objectivity is an manifest sham, and their hypocrisy on the point is galling, and all the stories that might interest me are available for free on the Internet. Why deal with their exasperating behavior when I don’t have to anymore?
But there is a catch. If advertisers aren’t funding the expensive work of reporting any more, and the consumers want their stories “for free,” what’s the funding model? Advertising can continue to fund some of the reporting in this new world, but nowhere near the levels as before.
I suggest that we are now in the middle of a return to open partisanship in journalism, and that this is the new funding model.
For many reasons, including some of those pointed out by the insufferable postmodernists, pure objectivity is a chimera. Everybody stands somewhere. Postmodernists erred in believing that God can’t know objective truth, and in their pomo pipe dream that He can’t reveal any of what He knows to us. But they were right about one thing, and that is that at one level partisanship for humans is irreducible. That means that “view from nowhere” journalism is just as wispy and foglike as the “view from nowhere” anything else.
So, the thinking might go, embrace your position, carry it on your sleeve, and go out there to tell your story. The mechanism exists to do that now. The thing that irritated so many people about the old mainstream media was not that they had a liberal bias. The real irritant was that they could not be brought to admit that they had that liberal bias. The problem was not the bias, it was the lack of self-awareness (at best) and the crass dishonesty (at worst).
We have been edging into this new state of affairs. Fox News leans right, just as everybody else leans, tilts, and falls over left. The news anchors wear little American flags on their lapels. But this started to happen when everybody still thought that the pretence of objectivity was still important. “We report. You decide.” And of course, “fair and balanced.” But now, get a load of this.
The Fox Nation? As Sarah Palin might say, you betcha! What we are seeing is the development of open partisanship as the funding model for what will come to be accepted as responsible journalism. This is not just happening on the right with Fox, but on the left. The Huffington Post has now invested huge amounts of money to pay reporters. Think tanks like The Heritage Foundation will get into the act, and will start paying for stories that will be accepted as legit stories. Corporations — left, right, and middle — will of course do the same, and we will be okay with it. We are already far more “okay with it” than we would have been twenty years ago.
The results of this new journalism will come to be accepted provided: 1. That the source of the partisan funding is not hidden, and 2. If the footnotes and sources check out. Look at it. There are signs of this shift everywhere.