Writing in today’s Washington Post, William Raspberry tries to explain why newspaper columnists such as himself are still relevant in the new media age. I remain unconvinced.
There are scores of journalists writing interesting opinions — hundreds if you add the localists, with their intimate and helpful knowledge of small communities, and the specialists whose opinions are based on technical expertise. These are the people you ought to read before moving to a new town or buying a new car or digital doodad.
But why limit yourself to “scores of journalists”, or even hundreds, if what you’re looking for is information. The Internet is the greatest information resource in history and bloggers, who appear to be the target of Raspberry’s ire this morning, are nothing more than an outgrowth of the fact that the Internet makes it possibile for everyone to share their opinions. If I’m moving to Podunk, USA and want to know more about my new home, what makes the opinion of some journalist writing in the Podunk Journal more valuable to me than, say, the information that might be available in a well-written blog from a non-journalist citizen of that city ? Nothing, of course.
If the days of the Lippmannesque giants are over, so too are the days of the three (or four) dominant TV networks, thanks to the advent of cable. But it doesn’t follow that television itself is on the way out. And I can tell you from personal experience that you don’t have to be a giant to have a great (and occasionally useful) time in this business.
No, television isn’t on the way out, but it is changing in ways that the men who started it 50 years ago would never recognize. The same is true of the opinion business. Its no longer just the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, that people go to for political discussion and analysis. The world is open to them, and they’re taking advantage of it.
The same torrent of information that makes blogging attractive also underscores one of the services columnists provide: the weeding-out function. During those times when a single story dominates the news — as during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath — you don’t really need a columnist to help you know what to think. It’s those other times, when there is genocide in Darfur, political violence in Gabon, race riots in France, bird flu in Asia, the toppling of a government in Canada and a congressional scandal in the United States, that you may find it helpful for someone to arrange the information for you — not so much to tell you what to think as to tell you what, among thousands of options, you might want to think about.
I don’t know about you Bill, but I learned more about what was happening during Hurricane Katrina on a daily basis, and without all the hysteria and hype, by reading a few blogs that were devoting themselves to the subject than I did from CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, or Fox. And, to be quite honest, I don’t need you to tell me what to think, I am quite capable of figuring that out on my own, as are most other Americans.
As for the stories that we wouldn’t hear about if it weren’t for people like you, again, there are plenty of blogs out there covering those stories in depth, and in more detail, than any American newspaper or television network.
Face it Bill, the days when you could make easy money telling the rest of America “what to think about” are fading fast.
Maybe you should start a blog.
Linked with today’s Beltway Traffic Jam
