I, Journalista: Fashionistas by Any Other Name?

Conformity in the journalistic dormitories is at a premium in the age of media consolidation - the only tell-tale sign of hope for a substantive Fourth Estate in 21st Century America is the advent of the Internet.

Come hither or nigh, public scrutiny is greater than ever. So is the dissemination of knowledge. No longer is ‘mass’ America dependent on ‘mass media’ as a solitary source of current event information.

Disgruntled workers to societal victims, free reign is now at hand to publish. While on first take, the ability to publish may seem indiscriminate - the Internet does contain as much error as accuracy - the sheer volume of Internet publication provides an automatic ‘check and balance’. In short, more than at any time in human history, the common people have access to a higher quality of information about their societies and about their governments.

All one need do is drop by a public library, or a tolerant university, and login to the Internet free of charge.

The fact has not gone unnoticed. Some attempt to cash in on the Internet phenomena is being made by newspapers like the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer. Whether rightly, or harmlessly, an attempt to guide readers into ‘pre-approved’ line of thought is becoming apparent in the online offerings of these news organizations.

The tendency is more glaring at the Philadelphia Inquirer, a smaller newspaper that is more cash-strapped than its wealthier cousin The New York Times. Money buys influence. Money can also free one from influence to a greater degree, and with more agility, than if impoverished. It is the latter phenomena that becomes noticeable with the smaller newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer.

While arguments can be mounted that any news organization slants its coverage of world events, some economic realities do apply.

When the Philadelphia Inquirer saw the Internet - that Gutenberg in every home - beginning to provide news content without the need for the Inquirer, it did the obvious thing. It started a website. And it started to contribute to that online news content. But, interestingly, it also started to guide readers to pre-approved webpages that more or less camouflaged “authors” employed directly by the Inquirer. Only in afterthought does the Inquirer mention, if it does at all, that the content on these webpages are written by Inquirer employees.

One thinks one is getting a broad expansion of the news found in the Inquirer - when all that you get is a manicured illusion reproducing the same philosophical news content, content that may or may not be balanced at any given moment.

While harmless in these early days of the Internet, the clear desire to garner a larger share of Internet information - to control what is being read - is apparent. Small, insignificant in the overall for the moment, the trend shows potential to grow.

Particularly disturbing is the promotion of ‘blogs’ - supposedly autonomously written web pages that are in fact in-house productions by the Philadelphia Inquirer. One is reading individual commentary, but with a Metropolis/1984 twist, one is really reading the corporate Inquirer. It is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the two.

The phenomena has a bizarre, but all too real, parallel. Joseph Stalin infiltrated virtually every civic and military organization with ‘party spokesmen’ - for all intent and purpose, a civic official or military officer that looked like anyone else. Yet their sole purpose was to use that illusionary sleight of hand to infuse the Communist Party line into every aspect of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. People would think that it was a government official making decisions in the best interests of the local people. In fact, he was a pre-approved Moscow party line bullhorn whose only loyalty was to Moscow. And he or she would recommend what was in Moscow’s best interest, not the local people.

It is difficult to envision the news industry become anything like the Orwellian ‘Communist Party’ of the Stalin and post-Stalin eras. However, noticeable similarities do exist.

One of the more interesting is the employment of former lawyers as ‘experts’ on news or as news commentarians. While American society is desperately in need of apt legal commentary, all too often, what one gets is a Catherine Crier and Greta Van Susteren - stereotype driven, self-centered, and poorly educated, the Crier-Van Susteren ‘module’ of news reporting is disturbing. And ultimately hollow.

Catherine Crier has been known to conduct national broadcasts on social issues that she knows nothing about and clearly had done little research in an effort to do so. Such an incident took place concerning the federal John’s Law/Drunk Driving legislation in which friends can be held liable for the acts of an intoxicated person. Greta Van Susteren, and Nancy Grace, both fall into a slightly different ‘module’ of the news industry - not only do they know little about the topics discussed on their shows, as a guest on such shows, it becomes painfully clear that neither was much interested from the inception.

As an experiment, when watching all three of these news commentarians, focus on their word selection. A profound invocation of “I” is strewn throughout their language - as if they have personally experienced every topic discussed, whether it is poverty, rape, or auto accidents resulting in murder charges. Ms. Van Susteren is prone to invoking “I’ve been around the block a few times” - in appropriate dismissing tone - to squirm her way out of difficult on-air discussions, usually when she realizes she knows too little about the topic at hand to fend for herself among the guests.

On several national and regional network television appearances, the in-residence network legal ‘expert’ turned to me just before going on camera and asked what he was supposed to be talking about. “All I know is that involved an accident.” Oh.

One ‘expert’ criminal lawyer on CN8 - whom, fascinatingly, no one in his local county courthouse in New Jersey can remember him ever trying a criminal case in his career - asked what he “should say” just seconds before air time. “I don’t want to make a fool of myself.” During a commercial break, the ‘expert’ repeated the gambit. “You will let me know if I get off line, won’t you?” (As not an entirely unrelated aside, it should be known that the supposed expert is known to be intimately involved with female staff members at local television stations.)

Experts beg for knowledge? The oxymoron would appear inherent.

Anything goes in the 21st Century media exploits - anything to compete with the free flow of information via the Internet.

Which is precisely why so many news organizations are banding together to kill Google’s news search engine. Grafted from free news organization websites around the world, Google’s webpage actually outperforms the Associated Press and The New York Times in breaking stories - at times. As the recent unfortunate mine tragedy in West Virginia noted well, Google outperformed much smaller news outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer’s webpage hands down. The Inquirer was left standing in the informational dust with a hard-copy newspaper that blared a joyous headline that 12 miners had survived. In fact, all 12 were dead.

What the future holds is anyone’s guess, but it is clear that the traditional gatekeepers of information are mourning their loss of control over Americans - and licking their financial wounds as well. The Philadelphia Inquirer - and many of its brethren in the Knight-Ridder organization - are up for sale.

Look for increasingly desperate attempts by these news organizations to impinge on free access to information on the Internet in the pell-mell pursuit of profits.