In reviewing Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, a Fortune writer laments the death of “shared experiences” and the rise of the niche culture. The headline tells you where he’s headed: “The extinction of mass culture: The advent of 300 channels and the Internet has fragmented audiences - and the explosion of choice has left us poorer.”

He writes:

TV’s biggest stars are Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric, but they don’t appear in prime time and they’ve been around for years - before the 300-channel universe fragmented audiences and damaged broadcast TV’s hit-making machinery.

The Internet is by nature a niche medium so it has not created any stars, and probably won’t.

[...]

I think the explosion of choice has left us poorer in at least two arenas. The first is journalism. (Yes, as a Fortune writer, I’ve got a stake in the health of the mainstream media, which bloggers call the MSM.) The network evening newscasts, big-city newspapers and the national news magazines once had the money, access, skills, commitment and power to deliver lots of original reporting and put important issues on the national agenda. Today, they are all diminished.

Yes, there is more information available to us than ever, but I don’t think we are better informed. Niche media will, inevitably, continue to weaken mass media.

[...]

Politics in America has become polarized for many reasons, but a big one is the fact that people can now filter the news and opinion they get to avoid exposure to ideas with which they disagree. Anderson suggests that this could well be a temporary problem, and that if the major parties continue to move to the extremes and the quality of debate continues to deteriorate, the Internet could well enable a new party or parties, to arise.

Mass culture provides intangible benefits, too. Big stars, hit TV shows and even commercials help knit a society together. Think of the feeling that comes a few times a year - the morning after the Super Bowl or the Oscars - when tens of millions of Americans share a common experience.

There’s lots that’s wrong with the above analysis. The idea that Americans no longer talk about the Super Bowl is ridiculous. Janet Jackson ring a bell? That was certainly a “shared cultural experience.” Everyone I know has seen the Zidane headbutt, despite the fact that few people in the U.S. were watching live when it happened, and even fewer otherwise care about soccer. Wanna’ know why? They saw it on YouTube.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shared YouTube videos with friends. We laugh at them. We talk about them. We spread the word about hidden gems. A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a law school friend I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. We started talking about fun stuff we’d seen on the ol’ Internets, and found, perhaps not surprisingly, that we’d found and enjoyed much of the same stuff.

I suppose not as many people watch the Oscars as have in the past, but that’s in part because the product Hollywood’s putting out today is so dreadful. Which of course is an argument against filtering all of our entertainment content through a few powerful producers, as the Fortune writer seems to wax nostalgic for, instead of giving lots of people from different backgrounds and a variety of perspectives lots of opportunities to make movies — and have them seen.

The author’s TV laments are even more out of touch with reality. Choice has saved television. The most critically acclaimed shows on TV today — The Sopranos, Deadwood, Dog Bites Man, The Daily Show, The Shield, The Wire, Veronica Mars,, the list goes on — come from outside the three original networks. And you could make a good argument that to the extent that there is anything worth watching on the big three, it’s competition from cable that gave the networks the swift kick in the pants they needed.

As for politics, perhaps there’s some merit to the argument that when Americans quickly turn to blatantly slanted outlets for their sole source of news, those sources only serve to confirm existing biases, and discourage critical thinking. But I’m not sure what the alternative would be. Somehow, I’d wager that the same folks who long for the days when all our news was filtered through Walter Cronkite wouldn’t get quite so sentimental if said filter weren’t the left-leaning Cronkite but, say, Bill O’Reilly. Personally, I’d love for John Stossel to be the source of everyone’s news.

I think the Forbes writer is most off-base with his forlorn ponderings on the state of journalism. More people doing more reporting on more events from more places — even “biased” reporting — can only be a good thing. Who says stuffy newsrooms are necessarily the best model for disseminating information?

Here’s a quick anecdote to illustrate:

Yesterday, I was talking to two producers from network television about the Cory Maye case. They were floored. They couldn’t believe such an injustice could happen, and, what’s more, couldn’t believe they hadn’t already read about it. Why, they asked, hadn’t this been covered by the national media?

Good question. It’s not as if they haven’t had a crack or two at it. The Associated Press wrote the story up the day happened, and again on the day of Maye’s conviction. Nobody thought to follow-up. And Prentiss, Mississippi actually made the front page of the New York Times in 2004. Part of that article touched on the Maye case, too. But the reporter who wrote it had come to the story from a decidedly different angle than I had, and I’d argue consequently missed the story because of it. That’s because the reporter, Fox Butterfield, found the Maye case while writing a larger story on how the drug trade was ravaging America’s rural communities. When that’s your angle, it isn’t suprising to see how you might fail to look skeptically at a story about a poor black kid on Death Row for shooting a white cop during a drug raid.

I, on the other hand, came to the Maye case from a completely different perspective. I’m far more advocate than journalist. I was researching a paper critical of drug policing. I’m naturally skeptical of the drug war, and of drug policing in general. I’m less likely to take what cops and prosecutors say at face value. From that perspective, the case lept off the page at me, and practically begged me to do a bit more digging.

My point is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with coming at the news with a different perspective, or even with an agenda. In many cases, it can help get stories and trends that would otherwise be neglected some needed exposure. Blogs left and right — and soon, hopefully, the mainstream media — picked up the Maye case because it’s a great story, and it’s a horrible injustice. It doesn’t — and shouldn’t — matter that it first took a crazy-ass libertarian to recognize it as such.

The best stuff will float to the top. Right-wing sites and left-wing sites with news and opinion will babble on with stories villifying the usual pariahs, and no one not already converted will much notice or care. But periodically, one of them will break a real story, and it carries across the spectrum.

Confirmation bias and fractionalizing is a legitimate concern. But if you ask me, the alternative — letting a select group of editors and producers with similar experiences, and who generally think alike choose the news for us — is markedly worse.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 5:49 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.