The Doc Searls Weblog : Fulfilling the Promise

The bugger is, the most visible places to find news online are Web sites that bear the names of those same networks and newspapers that tend to suppress dissenting opinion.

What makes them any more visible than any other places? The Web isn't a TV dial or a newspaper stand, with limited spectrum or shelf space. Okay, the big media brand names have more advertising and cross-promotion. But that would only matter if the system were closed, with no alternatives. But that's not the case.

Thus, though the Internet hasn't necessarily done anything to hurt journalistic integrity or balance, it hasn't magically improved it, either.

What? Whose journalism? Whose balance? Whose integrity? How about Deborah Branscum, whose byline appears in Fortune, Newsweek andother mainstream media. In her blog she does what mightier-than-thou journalists rarely did when their media weren't pickled in the ocean of accountability raised like Noah's flood by the Net's endless sources, links and connections: she fessed up to the difficulties of doing a good job as a journalist and being a human being at the same time. Look at Dan Gillmor. Glenn Fleishmann. Or hell, me. Are any of us the journalists we were before the Net came along? Hardly. Are we more accountable? Readable? Involved? Or simply better? You betcha.

Voices of dissent have been particularly hard to find since Sept. 11. In this post-disaster, bomb-dropping, flag-waving age, those who dare to "think different" and--gasp!--request debate or scrutiny of U.S. foreign policy have been fired, threatened and booed off the stage.

Yes, the month after 9-11 was hard on journalists whose passions run a generally peaceful direction. Times were even tough for libertarians, who found their half-sympathizers on the right suddenly favoring activist government and their half-sympathizers on the left hiding behind the nearest rocks. But there was still plenty of dissent, and there's even more today. I didn't see The New Republic or The Nation going away. Noam Chomsky, the tireless contrarian and scourge of mainstream media, has a higher profile than ever. He was last spotted blasting the U.S. in Pakistan, courtesy of Dawn, Pakistan's leading English language paper.

And good luck finding people saying au contraire on network news or in your daily newspaper's editorial page.

Does Bill Safire qualify? In the New York Times he recently called President Bush's moves "dictatorial." How about Jim McGee in the Washington Post? Or Maureen Dowd, also in the Times?

Take a recent survey by media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. According to FAIR, The New York Times and The Washington Post in the three weeks after Sept. 11 published 44 op-ed columns stressing a military response and only two columns advocating more peaceful solutions. If that's balance, then I'm the Dalai Lama.

Alright, I'll give you those three weeks. But history is a lot longer than that. We were all in shock. There was more than zero dissent then, and there is plenty more now. Whether people agree with that dissent is another question. But it's certainly there.

The problem with this is that the big papers are where most readers turn for their "global" news. And readers are likely to visit those same outlets when searching for news on the Net.

People trust what they know. Big surprise. If that weren't the case, Starbucks wouldn't be on every corner in San Francisco, and U.S. tourists would never order a Big Mac in Argentina.

Before Starbucks the default coffee was Maxwell House. And I don't see s shortage of non-Starbucks cofee houses.

Following that metaphor, I submit that CNN is the Maxwell House of broadcast news. There is no Starbucks, and there may never be. But there's a growing infinitude of journalistic coffee houses, each taking Scoop Nisker's advice personally: If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own.

Example. A few days ago I wanted the world to know there are VCs who are also primo human beings (in response to Dave's question, "What if VCs were mensches?"). So I wrote a brief item on my blog about Wally Hawley, one of the original good guy VCs. Now go to Google and look up "Wally Hawley." There's my blog, right at the top, in the "I'm feeling lucky" spot. If CNN mentioned Wally, even in a link on its site, it probably wouldn't be at the top of Google's stack. Why is that? Because CNN isn't plugged into the Web. It isn't built to give or take links. Yet. Once it is, watch it change.

People say they want integrity when it comes to journalism, and of course integrity must come with a familiar label.

Of course? Why? I think she means from a trusted source, or something like that. But why should major media be the only sources of trust?

So just like they pop into McDonald's because they know they'll get that perfect golden fry, readers turn to their alphabet-soup menu of media choices--ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN--trusting that the names they know will deliver the whole story.

I doubt people go to McDonalds because it has "integrity." They go because McDonalds is familiar, everywhere, and trusted to pump out a single familiar service that has been "branded" into billions of brains over forty years. And because they give goofy toys to kids. But does anybody trust McDonalds to deliver Fine Dining? No. That's a form of integrity McDonalds does not have. By the same token, does CNN deliver Fine News? Think about it.

And who are these "readers," anyway? Are they the zillions oggled by MediaMetrix, which is a paid service of the advertising industry? AOL users? Probably.

But the irony of AOL is that it gives millions of TV viewers an easy way to migrate from the tube to the Net, which is like wandering out of a mall into the rest of the universe. The fact that customers continue to visit the mall doesn't mean the rest of the universe isn't there, or that people have no interest in discovering what's there.

And what about reports that the Internet is cutting ever-more-seriously into the mass market's TV time? Are these people just going to "view" the usual sources on the Web? Think about it. On TV a viewer has a choice of only few hundred TV channels. On the Web, there's a vast universe of sources, few of them "channels" in anything like the televised sense. Many of these sources, such as the one you're reading now, are journals. They are the promise of Poor Richard's Almanac, fulfilled. Thanks to the Net, the Web, and a growing portfolio of very useful software, we finally live in a democracy where everybody's most available First Amendment freedom is to run a press of their own.

After White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer asked the networks not to broadcast unauthorized video of Osama bin Laden--allegedly in the interest of public safety--the networks folded faster than you can say "censorship." Did a chorus of concern about repressed information bombard the networks? Nope.

Yes, the Washington Post reported, with some irony, that TV networks folded on this one. They are clearly paying a price in credibility, if support from ther media is a measure. And hey, maybe they weren't wrong to "fold," if the Bin Laden videos actually did contain secret messages, as Condoleeza Rice and others suspected. If that were the case, these weren't just propaganda videos, just as certain airline flights on September 11 weren't just airline flights. And what did we miss, really? Did Bin Laden say anything new or newsworthy? And was the info utterly unavailable from other sources? No.

The public is a fickle beast, so "we the people" didn't necessarily mind when the networks caved. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, which monitors public perception of the press, 70 percent of Americans are OK with media self-censorship if it's done in the interest of protecting the troops. Never mind that journalistic integrity is supposed to depend not only on getting the facts straight, but on reporting all sides of the story.

In wartime, majorities do that. But again, so what? The majority backed President Bush the Elder on the Gulf War by a huge majority, then threw the guy out of office later. And does Bin Laden's video represent a "side" of this story? Not clear. That's why we need lots of voices and links to the other voices that make wht they say useful and interesting. We have that. Just all those voices don't show up on your TV screen doesn't mean they aren't available.

This is where the Internet of our ideals should swoop in and save the day. People looking for information the U.S. party line didn't want you to know once figured the Net would allow them to have it at their fingertips. And yes, such information is documented on more left-wing Web sites, such as those of The Nation and Mother Jones, or at online magazines such as Salon.com or Slate.

A search on Google for "news" brings up names in the top 10 including ABCNews.com, CNN.com and the Fox News Channel. The Yahoo News page hosts direct links to Reuters, The Associated Press and ABCNews.com. Missing are the Salons and MoJos of the world.

Mostly standard stuff, I'll admit. But do Wired News and AllAfrica.com qualify as mainstream sources? Hardly.

The immediate variety of ideas we were promised in the Net's early days has been overwhelmed by phenomena such as Web portals' catalog-style categorizations and cross-marketing deals.

Now try this. Let's do a search like an ordinary user might run, looking for news about Afghanistan. Most of the Usual Suspects have moved out of sight:

There are, of course, the major news Web sites' message boards, traditionally rife with criticism no matter your topic of choice. But are you really going to heed the dissenting view of a reader with the screen name "Hot4Teacher?"

Again, yeah, but so what? The more interesting question is, will those media heed the best of those readers? They'd be dumb if they didn't.

Beyond that, there are the Web logs of would-be rabble-rousers. And there are Web networks such as Globalvision New Media and MediaChannel, which collect news from journalists outside the United States. But again, few Americans know to seek out these other points of view--or that they even exist.

Not if they go on Google or Yahoo. One look at referer logs tells the story. Look here and you'll find Google and Yahoo searches like this, and this and this and this, and this.

Now, of course I don't want national security compromised. But there's this other dilemma: Burying the news is as damaging as misreporting it. It makes for an uninformed public--and that same public answers polls or casts votes based on an incomplete picture of the world and how it works.

How is stuff that shows up in plain daylight on the Web "buried?" What we have in this new webbed world is a forest where falling trees make noises many more people can hear, and will be glad to report.

Despite the convenience the Internet has brought us, if people want the whole story, they're still going to have to dig. What's sad is that a public that's used to being spoon-fed its information is hardly likely to get out its virtual shovel.

This is hugely cynical and blind to the obvious. It's not like the Net isn't a cacaponous commons surrounding every medium, every business, every institution and enterprise. To call it silence insults the listener's own ears. Yes, you have to dig. But not hard. And yes, it's chaotic. But so is any real markeplace. Here in the industrialized world, we began to forget the clamor and buzz of real markets two hundred years ago, when Industry won the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to the Net, real markets are back. The market for information is just beginning to make itself understood on termsnot provided by a privileged monopoly of suppliers who only know how to pump "content" down broadcast pipes.

And let's step back and look at the chronology here. The Web is barely old enough for Kindergarten. Blogs are barely out of diapers. To say they haven't lived up to their promise is like dissing a toddler for not being a CEO.

Give us time. You ain't seen nuthin' yet.