Vindicating Time, but indicting the news media
John Cloud, the Time magazine staff writer who penned the article on Ann Coulter, is interviewed. He takes the opportunity to defend his relatively maligned piece on one of America’s most politically venomous vixens, as well as Time’s decision to put her on the cover.
I mention that only for background, as I haven’t read the magazine article he’s been catching so much heat for writing. Whether or not he should be vindicated for his article, the last paragraph of the piece says something with which I basically agree:
What I’ll say is that I think Eric Alterman and Ann Coulter engage in the same kind of debate. They don’t often make actual arguments. Instead, they throw names around. This is the point of my article. This is the way politics is engaged in debate now. And I think that his response to my article proves our point that this kind of dialogue, which is the Ann Coulter kind of dialogue, now holds sway.
Absent my personal views on either Alterman or Coulter, this really is the way we’ve learned to play politics, and it’s part of why I hate the way we play.
Honest discourse gets shouted down by an insufferable throng of pundits who have only self-promotion and tiresome talking points to fuel their rhetoric. Discerning where the fault lies for this brand of idiocy is something of a chicken-vs.-egg exercise; is it the media’s fault for feeding the masses this garbage, or is the audience at fault because they (really, we) clamor for it?
If I had to guess (and really, no arm-twisting is necessary here), I’d hang this yolk around the necks of every media conglomerate that decides 90% of what we see and hear—especially as it pertains to “news.” They could sell real, informative news if they had any desire, but the shortcuts to higher ratings and circulation, like those offered by having Ann Coulter on your panel discussion or the cover of your magazine, are much easier to pursue.
The growing contempt for the homogenization of big media (which, interestingly, some see as inherently liberal, while others see it as hopelessly conservative) has to be fueling a big portion of what some refer to as “open-source journalism” (my favorite example here). I’m not sure the big sharks will ever be completely overtaken by the millions of smaller fish in the sea of media, but even if they fall short of such domination, they will in the end help shape how the established media approaches it’s job. In some ways, they already have. And it seems to me that’s our best hope for repairing the broken discourse.
It’s almost like a sort of third-party journalism, where you don’t have to win it all to make progress; you just have to make people think.
