Elitists, citizens, young folks, journalism

Andrew Keen (author of Cult of the Amateur) makes a good talk show guest, and a good panelist too. He’s patient. Smart. Calm. Doesn’t shout. Doesn’t get angry. Makes some rather weird facial expressions sometimes, but on the whole, he’s very civil.

Keen has adopted a position that social networking is basically bad for society. He’s concerned that all this user-generated content, blogs, etc., are going to “ruin media.”

Keen was one of three panelists in a discussion hosted by CBC News (you can watch it online) on Wednesday evening in Toronto. Leonard Brody, of NowPublic.com, and Rahaf Harfoush, a 20-something research analyst, completed the panel.

The purpose of media, Keen said, is to inform and entertain. He doesn’t mention communication.

Brody, on the other hand, proclaimed: “Your children will not read newspapers” — because they can’t communicate there.

As you might imagine, it was a fairly interesting discussion. I’ve seen Keen a few times on TV, pimping his book, and he wasn’t all that much different here — except that the addition of co-panelists tempered his authoritative manner somewhat. Keen’s idea of an “independent source” of information is the Guardian (he likes to call it “the London Guardian”; maybe he’s afraid we will think it’s still in Manchester). He made sneering and incredulous faces in response to a questioner from the audience who suggested that we need more diverse sources such as Al Jazeera. It’s the only time I’ve seen him being bluntly rude (it wasn’t pretty).

Tell Me a Story

“The basis of news, to me, is stories about people,” Harfoush said.

Brody emphasized stories and also analysis as important products of journalism. We need good quality analysis and good quality content packages, he said — and we need journalists to produce them. Breaking news will likely leave the purview of journalists, replaced by “a network of eyes and ears that traditional journalists can use,” Brody said.

Keen agreed that critical analysis — performed by trained journalists — is vital. However, he remained certain of his righteous cause: “We have nothing to learn from children,” he said, provoking a growl or gasp from many in the audience of some 300 people. His reference, if I’m not mistaken, was to Facebook users, and to the repeated examples offered by Harfoush and Brody of how younger people interact with media today.

“It’s a return to the medieval,” Keen said. Today we have an elite of super media-literate individuals, while everyone else is swimming in garbage.

Friday’s keynote speaker expressed some of the same ideas, although in a less arrogant manner.

“Our audiences are literally drowning in information,” said Mike Oreskes, executive editor of The International Herald Tribune and author of a new book about the U.S. Constitution. (You’d think a guy who’s spent 30 years in journalism would have learned to use the word literally correctly.)

“The solution to information overload is journalism,” Oreskes said. People want orientation and direction to lead them through the thicket of information. This sounded a lot like Keen, to me, and not like what I had heard from Brody and Harfoush. (Read more from Oreskes’s speech.)

How Do You Decide What to Believe?

Brody said people don’t trust — and don’t want to trust — only one news source. The days of the authoritative source have ended. “They want to triangulate truth on their own,” he said.

“If you care, you’re going to pursue the information,” Harfoush said. There are topics that a given person does not consider interesting, but the same person will invest time and effort in finding out more about other topics. This is true whether that person is clicking on the Internet or standing in front of a rack of magazines at the newsstand. (Mathew Ingram live-blogged this panel discussion.)

I was wondering whether journalists can make people care. I think if you tell a story really well, you can.

Oreskes worries that “the solar system of YOU” (referred to by Brody on Wednesday night) is in mortal conflict with “the actual solar system” of reality, the world outside your personal life. The victim of that mortal conflict might be democracy itself, because democracy requires consensus and compromise — and you can’t achieve those if you don’t understand other people.

I’ll be the first to stand up and agree with Oreskes that a key role of journalism is to help people understand the world — both the world outside their own home and the world on the other side of an ocean. But I question his assertion that there exists “an actual solar system” that any one journalist can accurately portray. The world represented by one person, or one news organization, is never going to be the same as the world seen by every other person. Everyone lives in the center of “the solar system of YOU.”

Call Up Merleau-Ponty

Oreskes believes you can “set aside your own views and lay out a set of facts, a sequence of events,” in a way that is accurate. I would argue that the best you can do is call it the way you saw it. And the way you saw it … well, there’s bound to be at least one other viewing angle, isn’t there?

The reason we need Al Jazeera, Mr. Keen — and a whole lot of other voices besides that, and besides the Guardian (which is, without question, a shining beacon in the journalistic world) — is because every voice comes from a source, a person with two feet on the ground in the world, and no two of us are ever standing in the same spot.

Democracy is messy, noisy, disorganized. Democracy means you have to shut up and listen. You’ll get a chance to speak too. But this one-way authority thing isn’t working very well, at least not in my country, that big aging empire sandwiched between Canada and Mexico. Stories are great because — unlike a shouting match, an argument, or a debate — stories invite people to listen. Stories are entertaining and informative. But stories are also communication. A storyteller has to listen to other stories, the same way musicians listen to other people’s music. The people in a democratic society need to listen to one another — not just to a mediated, filtered version of the truth.

“In this new world,” Oreskes said, “we [journalists] are no longer gatekeepers.”