The Best of Most Possible Worlds
Dear Jim,
It's Day 3 of our Book Clubbing, which means it's time for us to crawl back
out of the little tunnel we've excavated and return to our day jobs. But before
I surrender this space, let me hit a couple of points.
Rosen wants journalists, who he mistakenly thinks have "lost touch," to drop
what they're doing and create a debate society for citizens, who he thinks are
"alienated," in hopes that the Big Palaver will convince them to join together
and take a crack at solving society's problems. Body check me if I'm being
unfair--but actually solving problems takes a backseat to process
in the Rosen universe. To invoke a computer-industry cliché, process is a
strange metric to judge the success of a piece of journalism. If an article
doesn't encourage the masses to meet and cogitate, it's a failure? As I
finished his book, I couldn't help but think, Wouldn't Rosen be a lot happier
working as a union organizer or ward heeler than as a press critic?
Like the '80s activists who used the phrase "economic democracy" as their
euphemism for socialism, Rosen cribs the word "democracy" to serve as a vague
stand-in for the Deweyan utopia he wants us to build. Please, include me out!
Or give me a better idea of what this Deweyan democracy will look like.
Rereading my previous entries, I blushed at my Panglossian take on American
journalism ... but when my blood pressure stablized, I felt vindicated. Whereas
95 percent of American journalism used to be crap (Sturgeon's Law), I
personally reckon that only 85 percent of it is now. What strides we've made!
So if Rosen really wants to frame his debate--and his call to arms--around some
imagined "crisis" in American journalism, let him make a better case about how
awful things are. (Parenthetically, I agree with your Monday
correlation of the late-'80s recession and the cuts in newsroom budgets
with public journalism's boom. Those were dark times for journalists, and I
fear that some of them went grasping at straws.)
Journalism ain't broke, and Rosen isn't the man to fix it even if it is. For
the time being, I'll put my trust in that the rollicking goulash of advocacy
journalism, public-interest lobbying, scientific inquiry, straight-up news
reporting, first-person confessional, government documents, academic findings,
rumors, and innuendo that finds its way into print and into the wires.
Regards,
Jack
