It’s ‘Celebrate Old Media Day’ here at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, and following Freddie on Gladwell on Free, I thought I’d chime in with my own appreciation for the news industry. Like Freddie, I’m not sure things are getting better, and I tend to think recent events bear this out. The revolution in Iran, widely-lauded by many as some sort of unmitigated triumph for the blogosphere, is perhaps the best example of why we need newspapers and news agencies. We need Tehran Bureaus (and no, I’m not talking about this one, however admirable its first-hand reporting has been) to understand what’s going on in Tehran. We need reporters on the ground, doing their best to formulate a systematic picture of what’s actually happening. And we need editors with experience, access, and money, with the wherewithal and resources to send reporters and analysts into dangerous places to get the news for us.

Maybe this is a romantic view of news gathering, but I think we’re guilty of buying into an equally romantic vision of the future of new media. Twitter, YouTube videos, first-hand accounts of clashes with riot police circulating around the blogs; these are all fascinating nuggets of information. But taken individually, detached from any broader context, they mean very little. In some cases, they’re downright deceptive. Does anyone think Twitter users in Tehran represent an accurate cross-section of Iranian opinion? I suspect rural farmers are slightly under-represented, though perhaps they’ve got a hashtag floating around somewhere (Reactionary Rural Iranians on Twitter – RRIT?). More significantly, does anyone think the spectrum of tweets highlighted on Andrew Sullivan’s blog represents an accurate cross-section of Iranian opinion? This is not to criticize Sullivan, but he’s one man with two interns, not a news agency with access to credible sources on the ground.

New media enthusiasts started out by criticizing the way newspapers report the news, but in recent years the debate seems to have shifted from a critique of their methodology to a critique of the very notion of professional news-gathering. We’ve gone from conservatives criticizing the media for liberal biases to conservatives criticizing the need for a “mainstream media” in the first place. So now we’re saddled with ridiculous outfits like Pajamas Media, which purports to replace newspapers but is in fact parasitically dependent on their reporting. Original commentary is all well and good, I suppose, but there’s not exactly a dearth of opinion floating around the blogosphere.

And now for my dirty little confession: I want somebody to filter my news consumption for me. I want editors and fact-checkers and analysts to sift through the news of the day, ferreting out false information and reporting on the relevant stuff. I want experts available to inform me. Yes, I know – I have no agency; I’m ceding control of information to corporate media conglomerates who want only to dictate my consumption patterns; I’m playing into the hands of an establishment that has no interest in serious reporting. But here’s the thing – I want a filter for news consumption. I’m not qualified to come up with informed opinions about the issues of the day absent some sort of expert analysis. I think blogs have levelled serious and worthy criticisms about the way we report the news in recent years, but these are reasons to change the filter, not get rid of it altogether.

Scott is right, of course.  The blogging community functions more like a sawed off shotgun than one of these, even when we’re dealing with topics that are undoubtedly long range.  Some pieces might hit the mark, but a lot of them won’t.  Nevertheless, there is something good and valuable to this sort of approach that I think Scott touches on a bit, but largely leaves out of his post.  [Read more →]

This is what I kept thinking this weekend: if I wasn’t online, an avid blogger and reader of blogs, and if I didn’t frequent the New York Times, I wouldn’t know a damn thing about the phenomenon in Iran.  It would feel like just any other story from the “crazy Middle East.”  I wouldn’t have seen images of the streets of green-clad protestors.  I wouldn’t have seen the beatings or the fires or read the twitter feeds or the first hand accounts.  I wouldn’t have seen the youtube videos.  And lest it be forgotten, the news most people receive if they receive any at all is from their televisions.

I don’t have television, but I was at the gym this weekend and flipped through all the channels and literally there was almost nothing to be found.  There were talking-heads opining.  There was Bill Kristol on Fox, doing the whole Kristol song and dance. The only place I could find it was at the Dish where Andrew et al have been doing what can only be described as brilliant coverage, and at some other blogs and sites like Juan Cole or Michael Totten (including the NYTs).

Here’s what irks me to no end, though.  I “watch” this all go down via the blogs and youtube and it is gripping.  It’s emotional – or at least I feel emotional watching it.  It’s surprising and dramatic and frightening and hopeful.  It’s, as they say, great  TV, only it’s not on TV.  You can find it only in soundbites and under the veil of talk-shows, or confined to the small segments the networks were able to devote to it.  But this is the sort of news that should be on all day. [Read more →]

• Paul Romer envisions Hong Kong like city-states for developing countries.
• Stephen Walt discusses realism and tolerance, using DODT as a leaping point.
• Eric Brown and Darwin Catholic discuss bioethics, health care, and Catholic teaching at The American Catholic.
• Shafeen Chanaria wants kids to be exposed to the real world from a young age.

[Read more →]

So this is a neat new site for any of you who may read Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher, Patrick J. Deneen and the many other conservative writers who make up Front Porch Republic.  I’m personally very excited because it looks like this site will focus on the very issues I’m most concerned about – culture, community, the environment, and localism.

From the About page:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

Though there is plenty we disagree about, and each contributor can be expected to stand by the words of only his or her own posts, the folks gathered here more or less agree with the above assertions. We come from different backgrounds, live in different places, and have divergent interests, but we’re convinced that scale, place, self-government, sustainability, limits, and variety are key terms with which any fruitful debate about our corporate future must contend. We invite you to read along, and perhaps join the discussion.

[Read more →]

You may have to put some of this in your Helen Rittelmeyer-style “things I believe but cannot prove” file. Fair warning.

I read stuff like this, from John, and am intrigued, and I always think it is cool to see people hashing out these kinds of intra-ideological issues. Matter of fact, it’s kind of my favorite. But I am left, reading John’s post, and many like it from what we might call the American Scene strata of contemporary conservatism, with a deep dissatisfaction and sense of injustice. Because I think that John and Will Wilkinson and many other reformist conservatives have the unfair habit of judging conservatism entirely from the lens of their notional ideals of what conservatism is, but judging liberalism, and the Democratic party, from the lens of vulgar politics. [Read more →]

Time has a story out today on the 25 best blogs (and 5 most over-rated blogs).  No huge surprise, Andrew Sullivan makes the cut.  Looks like some good stuff all around – something for everybody – maybe a blog or two you haven’t read yet…probably a lot you have (like TPM, and HuffPo etc.)

Here’s an interesting one from the list I hadn’t heard of – “Detention Slip” – after perusing, I found this post:

“Ohio Teacher Cuts Class for Prostitution”

A woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do to make ends meet. And if that means making arrangements on a school computer to meet a guy for a quickie, then leaving your class to take care of business…so be it. Oddly, she was never questioned by her fourth graders as to why she always had so many fifty dollar bills available when they did their money lessons.

The problems with our education system really are manifold, no?  Good God….