Tag Archive for 'Jay Rosen'

GroupThink v. PressThink: The hidden face of political news making

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by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Consumerism, Culture, Markets, Media, Politics, Sociology, The Web and USA
. 3 Comments

Of late, there’s been something of an upsurge of bad news about the news, prompted probably by the coincidence in the acceleration in the decline of newspaper business models under the pressure of the global financial crisis and the upsurge in the online mediascape. Similarly, the spectacular focus on trivia characteristic of American journalism in a momentous year has given a push to already racy debates. But, as I’ve argued for yonks, far too many of these debates are themselves stuck in the past and premised on false dichotomies.

One of those is probably the image of the informed citizen, dutifully reading “all the news that’s fit to print” which underlies so many journalistic ideologies. I had something to say about that recently, along with the related theme that the world will come to an end if people only read stuff that fits particular niches of interest to them. As I was suggesting, that ignores the work of editorial categorisation and selection which has (always) already filtered “news” through a set of presumptions (incidentally, highly gendered ones) about the ideal type of the reader.

We can see a comparable level of forgetting – a key to the distortion inherent in any sort of ideological “thinking” – in the claim that if the newspaper declines, political discourse will decline along with it. Yet it was as long ago as 1962 that the American social scientists Peter Bachratz and Morton S. Baratz pointed to the importance of “non-decisions” in the exercise of power. Now a standard analytical approach in the public policy literature, Bachratz and Baratz observed that many interests and issues are sifted off the table before they even make the agenda.

Something similar operates in the definition of what constitutes “news” and in the sphere of political reporting and commentary, “the legitimate sphere of public debate”. Jay Rosen has a great post on this process at PressThink. It’s well worth keeping in mind next time one of these tired debates that haunt too much of the debate over the media rears its head.

The media and the motivation to blog

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by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Activism, Blogging, Media, Politics and Sociology
. 22 Comments

At Ambit Gambit, Graham Young riffs off a comment made by Jay Rosen on Twitter:

You know why there are bloggers, @Newshour? Because there is “safety first” reasoning in news. People get sick of it and take up their pens.”

Young doesn’t entirely agree – not that the performance of the media in reportage isn’t a jumping off point for the desire to blog – but that the problem with mainstream journalism is “safety first”. He presents three hypotheses which might explain the quality of political reporting and commentary. I think he’s definitely onto something here, though I’d also add that the structure of the media and its corporate logics are also factors we should take note of.

The post concludes:

…perhaps the urge to blog is driven not so much by the tendency of journalists towards “safety first”, but because journalists are by and large socially homogenous and don’t reaffirm the views of most bloggers, who in reaction create their own social networks.

Which is not why I blog at all, but then, I am an statistically inadequate sample, and this post is pure speculation on which I hope to get some feedback from other bloggers.

Part of the academic stuff I’m working on this year goes to the question of the motivation for the creation of “user-generated content”. In the context of political blogging, I’m not at all certain that the sorts of categories the citizen journalism literature employs – ie “monitorial citizen”, “public sphere” and so on – are at all adequate for understanding the desire to blog.

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McCain: Gaming the media and the blogosphere

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by
Mark
1 year, 6 months ago
in Blogging, Ethics, Foreign Elections, Media, Polls, Sociology, USA and Women
. 129 Comments

Although aspects of his critique are tentatively sketched by his own admission, Jay Rosen has hit more nails than he’s missed with his analysis of the significance of the Sarah Palin veep selection by the McCain campaign. Rosen’s article is rightly getting a lot of attention. It’s “personalities, not issues” as McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis said, and the dark divisive arts of Karl Rove are being revived for the umpteenth time, and to date, are apparently working. Though in an somewhat problematic article in Salon, problematic because of the gender stereotypes it re-enacts while purportedly criticising them, Gary Kamiya provides some hope for thinking the Democrats might turn things around. But the controversy over Palin’s claims to have opposed the infamous “bridge to nowhere” illustrates the double bind the GOP have the Democrats in.

At least the turf this issue – the purported opposition to earmarks and pork that Palin is supposed to share with McCain – is being fought over is a public policy issue rather than all the personalised stuff which just puts the Democrats and the media where the GOP want them. But Obama’s reluctance to use the words “lies” and “liars” shows he knows the score. He’s being criticised for that by liberal bloggers, who are cheering on the media “fact checking” exercise.

But all this truthiness is also at great risk of playing into the GOP’s hands – because it reinforces the equation of the media and blogosphere with the Democrats Rosen identified as the tactical positioning the Republicans want – and which George W. Bush reinforced with his claims about “the angry left” in his RNC video link. The culture wars schtick works – because the America of Wal-Marts and small town “values” has more electoral power in the swing states that count than the wonky redoubts of the blue staters. And a lot of those voters – who don’t source their news from the internet but from cable tv – and get their analysis from others of like mind in their own circles rather than bloggers, commentators and wonks – are seeing what McCain wants them to see – a feisty outsider being beaten up by the Beltway elite. Hence McCain’s polling gains, among other demographics, with white women.

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