A reply to the complaints of the paid professional punditry on the subject of having lost their previously impermeable media monopoly they are just now only realizing hit an immoveable iceberg quite a while ago with the Internet, cell phone, and iPod revolutions.
by Michael S. Hart
Internet User #199
Founding Member of
Project Gutenberg,
World eBook Fair &
General Cyberspace
“And The Band Played On. . . .”
The Titanics of world media crashed, full speed ahead, into these new media options years ago. . .and. . .
These people STILL don’t realize that half of the world population that will ever buy cell phones already have done so; nor are their realizations of the world view in touch with the effects of such a change from one-way media to two-way media, but are still in shock that the Internet provided media coverage to bloggers that toppled “The Great and Powerful Oz” in the form of Dan Rather, while their news reports tried and failed, to make a fake story about toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein.
The fact that “The Emperor Has No Clothes” is becoming obvious for half the world population directly via their cell phones, they can see it for themselves, and can no longer be fooled quite so easily as the United States Congress was fooled by the faked “Tonkin Gulf Incident” that led to “The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” that created The Viet Nam War” in a true homage to “You supply the pictures and I’ll provide the war” of the height of Yellow Journalism.
If you’ve been paying attention to the professional media pundits, then you’ve probably heard at least some of their complaining from their professional pulpits that their monopolies on information in the new world of communication are waning, and that this informing of the public is increasingly being done more on the order of that “of the people, by the people, for the people,” that was the ideal of the founding fathers of modern democracy.
According to the professionally paid punditry, they have done what anyone would have, could have, and should have done in the face of their admittedly “situational ethics” of their various times, but, in face of all that, I just wonder if perhaps these pundits should not have had more to say about many issues if not for bosses up an already crowded ladder of mostly prevention of stories going out.
“Prevention of Stories Going Out?”
Just ask anyone on the political beat at any media level, and they will likely tell, off the record, and some even on the record, the number of important investigative journalism results that actually get refused for publication are DOUBLE the number they published.
Twice as many political revelations get withheld as published. . .
just ask around. . .or so some research. . .you will find that Mr.
Jack Anderson, perhaps the most powerful political reporter of the last century, says his work output was only 1/3 what it should be, mostly as a result of political and professional pressures, put on him in no uncertain terms, that such-and-so political figures were NOT to be discussed in light of what he had uncovered.
“The Historical Record”
The Encyclopedia Britannica is often cited as an example of a best result of the professional system, usually in contradistinction to the amateur efforts of Wikipedia.
However, Britannica’s spectacular failures to report on Einstein’s
1905 writings that fundamentally changed our understanding of this entire universe, along with their simultaneous refusal to change a centuries old attitude towards racism, the roots of World War One, just to name a few instances of brittle Britannica bias, should be enough reason alone to encourage other sources of information.
Marvin Minsky, arguably, “The smartest man in the world,” at least by the standards of Isaac Asimov, says that, “You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
How can you learn anything more than one way if the professionals’
attention span is that of a myopic gnat?
What we need is MORE information sources. . .not less!
“The Future Is Not The Past”
Paid professional pundits predict the future based on the past and they make this mistake time and time and time again simply because they know it is the safe thing to do.
Britannica didn’t mention Einstein until around 1923.
He was on the front page of newspapers around the world for years, so what was the idea of not putting him in the Britannica?
Well, the truth may just be that the venerable Britannica was just too invested in the world of Isaac Newton.
Then again there are the questions of Darwin, evolution. Piltdown, and a host of other political pressures on pundits at Britannica’s desks, and others, including “The Monkey Trial” which was do blown out of proportion that most people forgot that Clarence Darrow was NOT the winner in that spectacular court case, to which thousands, even millions, of people paid more attention than we to Watergate.
Speaking of Watergate, do we have to be reminded that Bob Woodward was the lowliest of nobodies at The Washington Post, and how lucky we are [or unlucky, to those millions who would still prefer Nixon to have been re-elected for a third and fourth term, the law about such re-elections not withstanding]. . .how lucky we were that the story, like so many others in Washington Post history was not just killed outright by professional edict from above.
“A Professional Pundit”. . .What Does That Mean?
The first thing you have to realize about the professional pundits is that they are not independent.
Not independent.
They start their jobs the same as all of us with layer after layer of bosses, bosses’ bosses, middle management, top management and a whole layer of executive suites and owners above all that, meaning that every one of the layers must agree to get a story published.
HEADLINE!
Every One of the Layers Above Must Agree to Get a Story Published!
How much can actually get done when every one above you has to say “Yes” to every story you do, either implicitly or explicitly?
How much can actually get done when every one above you CAN SAY NO and kill your story.
Let’s just say you are such a good reporter than 90% of your ideas get the green light from your boss, and 90% of his recommendations get the green light from the next boss, in line, and so on. . . .
90% of your stories get approved by your #1 chain of command boss 81% of your stories get approved by your #2 chain of command boss 73% of your stories get approved by your #3 chain of command boss 66% of your stories get approved by your #4 chain of command boss 59% of your stories get approved by your #5 chain of command boss 53% of your stories get approved by your #6 chain of command boss
…Mid-level Hierarchical Structure Lies Approximately Here…
48% of your stories get approved by your #7 chain of command boss 43% of your stories get approved by your #8 chain of command boss 38% of your stories get approved by your #9 chain of command boss 35% of your stories get approved by your #10 chain of command boss 31% of your stories get approved by your #11 chain of command boss 28% of your stories get approved by your #12 chain of command boss.
Obviously the bigger the media giant you work for [and doesn’t the majority still want to work for the Big Boys], the higher the odds are that there will be more levels of bosses you must appease.
Let’s say your local media lies somewhere in the middle levels.
That would mean that just about half of the stories written by the reporters that have a 90% batting average, and whose bosses have a 90% batting average, etc., etc., etc., actually ever get published in your local media.
Obviously the higher up the food chain, the more likely your story is to be eaten by a higher level predator.
So, if you get your news from CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, BBC, CBC, etc…
the odds are that you rarely, if ever, hear much of anything on an order of competition. . .they all answer to the same kind of plain and obvious system. . .they usually give the same sound bytes more or less. . .more and more. . .even in the case of the BBC who used to be the flagship for saying what the others would not, could not or should not say.
However, since the BBC got into the money business with a reversal of cash flow that would have made “Scrooge McDuck” quite proud, it has limited itself to the more mundane in the world of news as has PBS when it also repositioned itself as a commercial network, and, I should add that, technicalities notwithstanding, it should be an awful lot more than obvious that both the BBC and PBS headed in an awful lot more of a commercial direction in the Bush II Era.
“Then the End Result is What?”
The end result, as with all new media technologies, is first a new wave of publication. . .”The Powers-That-Be” just cannot move fast enough, really don’t WANT to pay attention to “New Wave” stuff and the result is that they are like “The Titanic” for the first years of any new trend, running “full speed ahead” in a direction that’s no longer the direction they really want to go.
and. . .
It’s not as if there is a “vacuum” in the “New Wave” of publishing via the Internet, Podcasting, cell phones, etc. . .the rest of the world is just ignoring “The Olde Boye Networke” and moving on from a world that just barely exists for them any longer, the world for which “The Olde Boye Networke” is boss. . .level after lever as we saw above. . .to a world in which they can get a true first-person report from a variety of someones who do not have to say a pledge- of-allegiance to their megacorporate kieretsus before work each of their workdays until that dreaded day when they are “downsized” to a new location 6 feet under the ground on which they walked a walk precribed by their bosses, never the walks proscribed by bosses of bosses of bosses. . .”look for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.”
Perhaps, if we, the people, are lucky, these people will write the record of all they were forbidden to write. . .in their last days, and we will finally have, albeit on their death beds. . .reporting from their own perspective rather than that of Big Brother.
There are four parts to this article by Michael Hart. Follow the links below to continue reading.
The Cult of the Amateur – Part I
The Cult of the Amateur – Part II
The Cult of the Amateur – Part III
The Cult of the Amateur – Part IV