Near the end of Howard Kurtz's new book, Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time, I found the clue to the Washington Post media critic's reflexive dislike of the Net: he thinks it's all a big talk show. Like many traditional journalists, Kurtz supports freedom of the press in theory, but in practice he finds it appalling - he's not ready for a world in which everyone gets to be Clark Kent or Lois Lane.
Kurtz is not wholly off base when he implies that the character of some discourse on the Net is like that on Ricki Lake, where confessional goofiness, wild rumor, and personal attacks are normal. But Kurtz and his confreres use the most frivolous talk on the Net as an excuse to dismiss its value as a source of journalism.
That same attitude reared its head when veteran journalists like former TV correspondent Sander Vanocur and newspaperman Bill Kovach participated this March in a "new media" panel at the sixth Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both insisted you need good editors (read: an established news organization) to do good journalism. And Vanocur opined how the Net may be little more than "a Tower of Babel," where people use their computers as megaphones to send their personal gripes around the globe. "I hear America kvetching," Vanocur said, paraphrasing Whitman.
Ironically, I'd paraphrased the same line myself just weeks earlier in an Op-Ed for the San Francisco Chronicle: "I hear America typing. And, sure, not everything they say is well-thought-out, or even well-intended, but suddenly there are a lot more voices out there being heard, and a lot more people listening." My point was that the Net ends the monopolies the power elite have long held in defining public debate. That same leveling is occurring in the playing fields of journalism, thanks to the Net, and Kurtz & Company's glib dismissiveness may reflect their own discomfort at that fact.
What's happening, despite the dismissals of Kurtz and Vanocur, is neither a Tower of Babel (since real stories such as Time magazine's "Cyberporn" scandal have already been broken on the Net) nor a talk show (since there's no cynical producer tweaking our postings for outrageousness so they'll earn higher ratings). Instead, everyday Americans are starting down a trail blazed by traditional journalism.
Consider: the harshest talk we see on the Net now is scarcely more inflammatory than that produced by American printers and publishers at the founding of the United States. The "tradition" of "objective" journalism, while utterly worthwhile, is a relatively new invention. So it's no wonder Net users have got some catching up to do before they match the standards of The New York Times. But the thing to remember is, they will catch up. And the line between professional journalists and the rest of us will be blurred, perhaps even erased.
Kurtz's dismissiveness isn't limited to his book - it also emerged in two stories involving the Net. In both instances Kurtz wrote a column criticizing Net culture for treating reporters harshly, even though the Net's criticism of the reporters was wholly justified. A 1994 Kurtz column involved a Los Angeles Times article that conflated hackers, pornography, spies, and cryptography into a single, incoherent, inflammatory story, while a 1995 column addressed the hubbub surrounding Time's "Cyberporn" cover story featuring a fraudulent "study" of online porn from an undergraduate hustler at Carnegie Mellon University.
Did Kurtz's columns criticize the reporters who wrote those stories or the editors who chose to run them? Did Kurtz praise the amateur reporters on the Net who dug up the truth behind a story whose sources had snookered Time? No. Instead, he criticized Net users for being uncivil and unkind to journalists who had royally screwed up. In Kurtz's world, it seems, it's Us versus Them, where traditional journalists are Us, and those Nethead and talk-show yahoos are Them.
Increasingly, though, there won't be any Us versus Them - we'll all be playing the role of journalist. The stories our grandparents shared over the back fence are now things we share with each other online. The result? The fiction that "news" is different from "gossip" will be harder to maintain - which means, perhaps, that we should upgrade our opinion of gossip. After all, we don't really read press accounts of the crash of a 7 year-old pilot or the search of Ted Kaczynski's one-room shack because we think it's "news you can use" (it isn't). We do so because we're social creatures - we're wired to be curious about what other humans are up to.
The Net ensures that "news judgment" decisions are no longer made solely by the pros, like Kurtz or Vanocur, who think they know what's best for us. Those decisions are in our hands now. So the task is no longer to find the newspaper editor we can trust - we must become that editor ourselves.
- Mike Godwin (mnemonic@eff.org) is staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and lives in Berkeley, California.
