Is the looming “death” of print news cause for panic?
Yes, according to New York Times columnist David Carr, it is. Just over a year ago he argued, “With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself.”
Carr’s doomsday prediction implicitly refers to the unconventional coverage provided by individual contributors at the likes of Twitter, BlogSpot, and all the other sources that allow anyone with a keyboard and a high-speed connection the pretense of journalistic ethics.
Avid readers and top publishers alike would have us believe that this shift in our understanding of what is and is not a credible source is catastrophic. Readers beware, they warn, the apocalypse of information as we know it is raining down from the digital heavens.
While it is reasonable to be wary, it is unreasonable to panic. The danger of these sources is that the process of discerning fact from opinion has become near unmanageable; tweets and blog entries are laden with heavy, scoffing reports on those stories and persons deemed undesirable by the individual contributor and gleeful praise for those of whom he or she approves.
Previously trusted sources such as newspapers and magazines are sadly closing up shop due to shrinking advertising revenues and too much content walking out of the virtual back door at no cost to the reader.
However, to accept the argument that it has now become more difficult to separate fact from opinion, one must subscribe to the popular yet unlikely theory that the folks in the “blogosphere” are inherently more biased, opinionated, and, frankly, human, than those who contribute to more renowned news sources such as the previously mentioned Times.
Journalistic training, integrity, and experience—along with sometimes-cushy retainers and salaries—ought to ensure that professional contributors leave bias out of the equation when providing us with the information so vital to our day-to-day existences. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case.
The truth is that evaluating sources has not become difficult on the eve of print media’s supposed “death”—it has always been difficult. To heedfully separate opinion from fact is a practice taught by every respectable high school English teacher, whose students know that strong bias is most cleverly and artfully hidden in eloquence. Any source that goes beyond listing facts and crosses into evaluating those facts carries with it a level of bias.
The principal change in post-print news coverage will instead be that the inevitable marriage between opinion and fact has finally been made public. Rather than naively pretending that there is such a thing as unbiased coverage, we will openly accept coverage whose bias is obvious and tangible. The oligarchic demigods at the world’s most well-respected news sources, whose final word was once considered all but infallible, have lost footing in the collective psyche.
Instead of lamenting the opinion-padded coverage offered by those who blog and tweet, we might sigh in relief at the emergence of honesty in a bias-burdened world, where pretending that respectable news sources give spin-free coverage can be likened to an adult believing that Christmas presents still come from Santa Claus.
We ought to rejoice in the knowledge that bias is no longer slyly hidden between the authoritative black and white type of the newspapers we read but rather shines as bright and as flashy as the Internet allows. Truly, sifting through biased information has become as straightforward as evaluating the speech of an opinionated uncle at the dinner table.
For better or for worse, news coverage has gone democratic.
Rebecca Quinn is a junior art history, Spanish, and French triple major. She can be reached for comment at [email protected].
