perfidy

Lileks, true to form, has some excellent perspective on the fallout from the forgery scandal.

But I think the number of people who regard the evening news as straight truth delivered by disinterested observers, can be numbered in the high dozens. Blogs haven't toppled old media. The foundations of Old Media were rotten already. The new media came along at the right time. Put it this way: you've see films of old buildings detonated by precision demolitionists. First you see the puffs of smoke - then the building just hangs there for a second, even though every column that held it up has been severed. We've been living in that second for years, waiting for the next frame. Well, here it is. Roll tape. Down she goes. And when the dust settles we will be right back where we were 100 years ago, with dozens of fiercely competitive media outlets throwing elbows to earn your pennies.

In retrospect, TV looks like a big smothering quilt: it killed the afternoon papers, forced the survivors to consolidate; it reshaped the news cycle to fit its needs, shifted the emphasis to the visual. It fed off the Times and the Post and other surviving papers, which had institutionalized the Watergate and Vietnam templates as the means by which we understand events. The old-line media, like its Boomer components, got old, and like the Boomers, it preferred self-congratulation to self-reflection. And so the Internet had it for lunch, because the Internet does not have to schedule 17 meetings to develop a strategy for impactfully maximizing brand leverage in emerging markets; the Internet does not have to worry about how a decision will affect one’s management trajectory; the Internet smells blood and leaps, and that has turned the game around, for better or worse. So we’re back to where we were in 1904 – except that the guys on the corner shouting WUXTRY, WUXTRY aren’t grimy urchins selling the paper – they’re the people who wrote the damn thing, too.

In some respects we are seeing a return to 1904. But it's a jazzed up, 21st century 1904. Back in the golden age of yellow journalism and muckraking, competing papers created wars and didn't worry too much about the truth. The competition is returning - Fox amidst the major media, and the thousands of blogs and webzines in the increasingly powerful new media. But it's different now. Like open source software and open source intelligence, we are seeing open source journalism. This is the 21st century stamp on the metaphor.

I think a closer historical analog to what we're seeing now is the pamphleteers of the revolutionary era. In many respects, the golden age of newspapers was the late eighteenth century. Small papers, they carried little of what we would think of as news. The occasional dispatch from europe, advertisements, and essays on politics, morals and religion. This is much of what blogs are today. However, instead of a small number of papers with circulation numbering in the thousands, today's Tom Paines and Alexander Hamiltons can reach millions with their essays and commentary. And again, they don't have to go through semi-monopolistic corporate media giants to get access to the public. Anyone with a computer and a phone has access the writers of the federalist papers would likely have killed for.

Personally, I can't wait for the building to come down.