The Binary.
The Binary is the only formula that matters now in news reporting. Two sides of a story. No in-depth. No detailed analysis. Just The Binary. Give me left and right with some reporter’s jibber jabber in between to frame it up.
Nothing at all happens in reporting anymore. It is over. Finished. A reporter may as well be a CITY-TV Speaker’s Corner booth for all they add to our collective wisdom.
Is it really that bad? Years of consolidation, downsizing, syndication and shortening of deadlines have made it so. The news media now must output product on a continuous basis. There is no longer a media cycle. No longer a battle for top of the hour supremacy. News is now like a metastatic informatics tumor. Born of cathode radiation and the urgency of the buck, stories are like some mutant T-Rex, two huge feet stamping first left, then right, then left again until it stumbles and dies. Or until its spinal cord is severed by a bigger story.
Gone are the days when a reporter would provide four angles or more to a story: a pro, a con, some experts, and then the reporter’s estimation of what it all means. The reporter used to have the ability to think long enough to offer a guarded conclusion about an issue without being accused of bias or editorializing. This was because the reporter was presenting enough evidence for there to be emergent facts. This was because the reporter was informed on the subject. Probably more informed than each of the other individuals interviewed.
Perhaps I am guilty of fostering a myth of origins here, but I don’t think so. I don’t recall being so utterly incensed by the banality of the formula. Even our beloved but belimed CBC has fallen victim. I listened to the news at five pm tonight and heard that same formula. Introduction; lefty; righty; then nothing. End of story. No conclusion is drawn, no analysis offered. There’s no time for it. The budget happened. People disagreed about it. Same thing tomorrow, I’m guessing.
So, thus goes our popular culture. Our societal outbursts are now the same. Left talking points, followed by right talking points, followed by left talking points, followed by right, with a steadily increasing volume and decreasing interlocution. We now talk past each other. We now perform our role in an ever-binary single act play, the tragedy of the missing facts. Nobody expects there to be an outcome or a dialectic. It is performative. The winner performs the best, delivering talking points with the most panache. In bars and coffee shops, we emulate the talk show hosts, talking over and shutting down as the desired outcome, rather than a meeting of minds with a single outcome - or at least some movement and mutual respect.
I lament this. I bodes poorly for us. It means power can do as power wishes without fear, since facts are inconveniences now disabled and submerged by the very culture of discourse itself. That culture of discourse mirrors the debasement of the news media and the absence of analysis in reporting. We are told to trust the news. We trust it and emulate it. We do.
I’m sure there is a level of frustration building around this. I’m sure this is at the root of the growing nastiness, the closing off, the burgeoning otherness that lurks just over the neighborhood hill. Our intellectual isolation is making us paranoid.
So, blogging specifically and the social web in general are important because they open a space of discourse with time aplenty for the development of arguments, the presentation of evidence, and the evolution of positions. The ever tightening and singular cycle of traditional mass media has squeezed off a good sized bubble of desire for more depth, more discussion and more meaning. Some facts, please. It should come as no surprise that bloggers and people who read blogs are the same demographic that has traditionally consumed mass media forms like newspapers. People do want facts. They care.
Canadian politicians still don’t get this. A few have tried, but as many have failed dismally. The Prime Minster’s chief writer in the last election cycle thought blogging was about getting away with insults not deliverable through talking points. No clue. No clue whatsoever. Politicians are now wind-me-ups with durabite batteries. Don Newman is a Max Headroom simulation.
Mr. lefty what do you think? Well, that’s surprising. Righty, what about you? Whoa, stay in the box there boy. Our advertisers aren’t paying for distractions like facts.
People are getting it. Mass media moguls are starting to get it and are making big moves into the social web. There is some hope. The biggest challenge will be to ensure social media do not become simply a mash-up of the same story we tell ourselves day in and day out. Our own private talking points reinforced by our well-worn feedpath.
So for me, the question is this: how do we ensure social media develop in a way that encourages debate and the necessary social dialectic, rather than grow silos of identity that stand defiantly against each other?
