Journalism's dumb diversity

Daily Kos reminds us (as if we could forget) that this is the year of the YouTube campaign video. The latest, hottest video, "in a very peculiar YouTube moment," goes back twelve years and belies Hillary Clinton's memory of Bosnian sniper fire:

This time, the problem for the candidate isn't something she just said that ended up on YouTube, it's that what she said is easily refuted by watching video available for everyone to see on YouTube.

It's another reminder that the Internet is changing the nature of journalism - taking battles to the blogosphere, lifting the classless Drudges of the net to the level of "serious" journalists, making quick celebrities of pudgy John McCain supporters, bringing America right into Obama's church, and panicking newspaper journalists.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Lee Gomes asks if the web deserves its power to influence politics. He thinks the web has its good points (diversity, the democratization of expression) and its disadvantages: "There is a danger that our politics might be shaped by insignificant events that assume an importance merely by having been caught on tape."

This democratization of expression is key, as Eric Alterman's thoughtful essay in the latest New Yorker shows. Alterman says the 1920s saw a similar intellectual debate on the tension between "knowledge-based elites" (like today's print-based snobs) and advocates of "democratic education" (today's Internet upstarts). The blogosphere's big bang makes "genuinely democratic discourse" possible.

But this discourse brings with it democracy's perennial problem: Equality lends itself to mediocrity, and democracy devolves to the lowest common dumb denominator. Alterman predicts, "And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism."

Gene Weingarten discovered this when he recklessly volunteered to expose himself to 24 straight hours of newspaper, TV, radio, and Internet punditry. His witty Washington Post account says it all:

There are too many voices, competing too hard, fighting for attention, ranting, redundant, random. The dissemination of fact and opinion is no longer the sole province of people and institutions with the money to buy network monopolies or ink by the ton. … Now, all is out of control. Everyone with a computer is a potential pundit; anyone with a video camera can be on a screen.