by Matt Kibbe
“I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet,” Obama said of Cardin’s proposal, “but I’ll be happy to look at them.” Why? “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.”17 There it is again, our top government official slipping easily into a presumption of which news is “serious” and which is mere “opinion.” Do you trust Barack Obama and Charles Schumer, or a free community of bloggers scrambling and digging to get the story first, and to get the story right? It’s the difference between central planning and robust competition that exploits the personal knowledge of dispersed individuals.
The Truth Cartel is pushing back, trying to protect its cozy relationship with the old institutions of the media that limited our direct access to things. But how could any single person actually have access to all the particular facts, as innumerable as they are, and always be able to know better, with certainty, what is legitimate, serious news, and what is just “people shouting at each other”?
(ONLINE) VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR
THE DISAGGREGATION OF INFORMATION ONLINE COMPLETELY changes the way we discover, learn, share, and organize. The new paradigm is a rowdy, decentralized model of exchange in which news consumers bypass the gatekeepers to share facts and opinions directly with each other on a grassroots level. This democratization of information and knowledge formation online is, in effect, radically Jeffersonian, enabling We the People to find out for ourselves what is actually going on inside the government fortress.
Today the New Media, made up of independent newspapers, online news outlets, blogs, radio shows, podcasts, and more, are breaking news and driving the conversation. In an age in which a “citizen journalist” can capture images or video of a news event on her handheld camera and immediately upload it to the Internet, it’s impossible to calculate the reach and impact of the New Media. American ingenuity drives us to continue to find new ways to use the tools we have—whether Facebook, Twitter, or smartphones—and the old methods of tracking influence are no longer applicable. The Old Media’s ability to control the content and flow of information is dead and gone. The nature of the decentralized structure simply won’t allow it.
The American people still turn to traditional media for news, but it’s clear they prefer options less encumbered with bureaucracy and tradition. CNN’s website, which leads other “mainstream” news outlets on the web, averages roughly 8.5 million unique visitors a day,18 compared to 800 million active users on Facebook, more than 400 million of whom log in on a given day.19
Impact is now measured by outcome, rather than with ratings and hit numbers—the way the Old Media calculates their importance even in the new paradigm. Stories the centralized news media and their friends in Washington, D.C., used to be able to ignore are now seeing the light of day, and the grassroots, bottom-up model for dissemination of information is proving to be even more potent than the old guard feared.
Drudge Report was the pioneer of this model. It began in 1996 as—and largely still is—a one-man operation, little more than a clearinghouse of the most interesting stories of the day, from anywhere in the world. In fact, according to a 2011 report from Outbrain, a content recommendation engine whose clients include the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the New York Post, Matt Drudge drives more traffic to news sites than Facebook or Twitter combined, even though these sites dwarf Drudge in unique daily page views.20 This is not to discount the impact of Facebook or Twitter. Rather, it reveals that the “one guy with a modem” power of the Internet still exists even today.
In June 2011, Glenn Beck left his successful program at Fox News (where he helped create a boom in sales of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom) to start GBTV, an Internet-based live streaming video network. The move represents one of the latest, and potentially the most radical, departures from the one-size-fits-all mentality of mainstream media. It is a logical step in the market-driven evolution of news media, away from the top-down to a decentralized system where the customer is always right. Speaking at a Business Insider conference on the state of the media industry, Beck described the high speed with which the world of media is disaggregating as the “most dangerous and the most exciting era of our lifetime.” We used to “go to the Sears Catalogue and get it,” Beck argues, referring to the old centralized model of doing business, necessitated by the pace of snail mail.21 With the Internet, customers now find the products and entrepreneurs they want online, cutting out the middleman, eliminating a need for a Sears catalogue. Our entire society is individualized, publishing, in effect, our own private, virtual Sears catalog every time we choose. We go to print in real time, based on what we do, view, reject, buy, and consume.
“This is the struggle,” Beck told his media-industry peers. “This is the answer for business. This is the answer for the [TV] networks. This is the answer for politics. The individual is the answer. You have the opportunity for the first time in all of human history to connect with the individual. Stop trying to be all things to all people. It won’t work. It worked in 1950; it won’t work in 2050.”22
When GBTV launched, on September 12, 2011, Richard Greenfield, a media industry analyst from BTIG, predicted “a watershed day for the media/television industry, with Glenn Beck set to launch a direct-to-consumer video network utilizing IP-enabled devices called GBTV. Despite the significance of GBTV, top media executives are not terribly focused on what Glenn Beck is doing, let alone concerned by it. Yet,” Greenfield predicted, “we believe they should be very afraid of the disintermediation underlying the launch of GBTV.”23 The new Internet-based network began with 230,000 subscribers, compared to an average of 156,000 watching OWN, Oprah Winfrey’s new yet traditional cable network.24
It’s as if Glenn Beck’s business team, in addition to his Fox viewers, were encouraged to read up on their Hayek as well.
NOT AFRAID OF AUGUST
THE LIBERATING POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND A DECENTRALIZED, open-ended online discovery process is integral to the story about the emergence of the Tea Party movement. There once was a time when there stood a virtually impenetrable wall—an inaccessibility of good information—between those inside the legislative process and the rest of us. On occasion, the political elite would cast their gaze down at the rest of us on the other side, but their focus was always inward-looking, focused toward their agenda, not ours. They wrote the laws and we would typically discover, after the fact, who did what to us. We might eventually discover the real story—if we were lucky, that is. In that world, the insiders had special knowledge that went hand in hand with being there, on the inside. Those committee chairmen writing the laws, their legislative staff, and the special interests who presided over the process by lending opinions and expertise were the primary inputs into the legislative process.
The rest of us were “rationally ignorant,” because the cost of finding out what was actually going on, and then doing something to stop it, was prohibitive. Good, timely information was too expensive. This was a competitive advantage for the looters and moochers inside the process. They had better access to information because they were willing and able to pay the price of admission. That made them hard to beat. This is the “concentrated benefits” and “dispersed costs” of political decisions. If you want something from government, a provision that would benefit you at the expense of everyone else, you have an extraordinary incentive to show up. The rest of us take it on the chin.
One indication that this dismal decision paradigm was shifting—that the constant ratcheting upwards in the size and scope of government driven by this political insider trading might slow—was the defeat, albeit temporarily, of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008. The falling cost of real-time information was leveling the playing field between the insiders and the rest of us, and that had big implications for the fu
ture ability of participatory democracy to break into the closed system known as Washington, D.C. There were new rules.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for one, had completely missed the broader implications of her own failure to collect enough votes in support of the first TARP bill, which failed on the House floor on September 29, 2008. After all, she and her Senate coconspirator, Harry Reid, had just larded the legislation up with more spending and passed it on the second round.
Surely she could just pull this stunt again on a health care takeover, right? She certainly seemed to think so. When asked by a reporter if she needed to pass the bill in July 2009, before legislators went home to face their constituents at town hall meetings back home, Pelosi said “I’m not afraid of August—it’s a month.”25 If you think that sounds arrogant and out of touch, you are missing the point. It was her House. Speaker Pelosi was in charge.
Or so she thought.
Under the old system, politicians would have voted on a bill they’d never read and that, thanks to the centralized media, Americans knew little if anything about. Members of Congress were shocked when they attended town hall meetings with their constituents in August 2009 and discovered that the voters knew more about the contents of the bill than they the lawmakers did. We didn’t need national reporters to track down a hard copy of the bill, study it, gather “expert” insight, and neatly package a message-managed story that reinforced foregone conclusions.
One of the defining moments in the debate over Obamacare was the speed with which tens of thousands of individuals learned about the actual contents of the bill. Untold numbers of online “eyeballs” read, parsed, analyzed, and then shared their own personal breakdown of the House legislation introduced by Democrats and made available online on July 14, 2009.
For all the fevered conspiracy theories promulgated by leftist advocates of Obamacare, there is only one reason why so many angry constituents showed up for the August recess town hall meetings. Unlike the members of Congress who were about to pass it, We the People had actually read the bill. The process had a striking similarity to the process of knowledge conveyance through voluntary exchange and shifting price signals typical of market processes. A “social intelligence” emerged as people debated, studied, reconsidered, and compiled a virtual community’s understanding—more informed, more aware of the implications of the proposed legislation than that of any one of the congressmen and senators standing there, haplessly, in front of angry constituents.
The media chose not to celebrate the democratization of the process but instead demonized the demonstrators, calling them “ugly,” “unruly,” “nasty mobs.”26 Try finding such unsavory pejoratives in the mainstream media’s coverage of Occupy Wall Street. Even the actual rats that occupied Occupy D.C.’s encampment at Freedom Plaza received less-hyperbolic coverage.27
But no one, not even in our democratic republic, loses power politely—especially not a centralized media regime that has reigned unchallenged for so long. What Democrats and the media discovered in the summer of 2009 was perhaps more frightening than the decades-long decline of the power of the Old Media cartel. It was the rise of the information-powered electorate.
TURNING UP THE HEAT
THE MEDIA RESEARCH CENTER HAS FOUND A CONSISTENT PATTERN of New Media beating Old Media to the story and the scoop time and again. It almost seems willful. From Van Jones to ACORN to Climategate, major news stories surface in spite of the mainstream cartel’s attempts to ignore, bury, or otherwise control the story. For example, networks and major newspapers “were stubborn in their avoidance” of Van Jones’s involvement in a nutty “Truther” petition supporting the idea that 9/11 was a carefully orchestrated government conspiracy. Most didn’t cover the story until it was clear Jones would resign his post as Obama’s “green jobs czar.”28 The Old Media was well behind the curve, which wouldn’t have been a story at all if they had still been in charge.
The Climategate scandal of 2009 featured classic information management tactics from the Old Media. The New York Times and the Washington Post both reported hacked e-mails from climate scientists. The story, according to MSM, was that they trash-talked skeptics of global warming. Only one outlet—CBS Evening News—reported the real story: that scientists had discussed how to hide a decline in global temperatures from one popular chart. The mainstream media—longtime global warming alarmists—had a vested interest in managing the narrative of this story.
Fortunately, the American people could read the e-mails for themselves, and had access to a wide range of analysis and opinions on the scandal thanks to bloggers, Fox News, talk radio, and online outlets. Had the scandal occurred in the 1970s, when the media were warning about global cooling and the coming ice age, we would never have heard the story.29 But thanks to the decentralization of news and information, we had access to the whole story, which is not a trivial event in this case. Without access to this kind of information, the global-warming alarmists, led by guru Al Gore, might have already steamrolled Congress to fix a supposedly dire problem based on cooked science. Indeed, what was once considered a fait accompli by the bipartisan duopoly in Washington, D.C.—that “impartial” science justifies the legislative rationing of energy in America—has suffered mightily under the decentralized accountability of activists, energized citizen reporters, bloggers, and just-plain citizens armed with e-mail or Facebook.
The media establishment has resisted change for so long they have missed the opportunity to change their behavior and adapt to the new world, while bloggers ensconced in their basements get the facts and uncover the real story. Welcome to Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” writ large. In 1942, this maverick economist described a “process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” This process “is the essential fact about capitalism.”30
The establishment’s news organizations are stuck playing catch-up to the thousands of newsletters, social networks, blogs, and other information outlets that redefine themselves on an hourly basis. It’s a harsh world when you are on the receiving end of market accountability.
CENTRAL SCRUTINIZERS
RATHER THAN ADAPT AND COMPETE WITH THE NEW ROUGH-AND-TUMBLE style of journalism, the old guard is on the attack, fueling skepticism of New Media standards, questioning motives, and writing off results. It’s a remarkably progressive approach to things.
Journalist Tom Price summed up the establishment’s feelings about the New Media in a 2010 essay in CQ Researcher, an industry publication that analyzes issues facing the news business and claims to offer, in their words, an “in-depth, unbiased coverage.” Referring to A. J. Liebling’s observation on freedom of the press, Price wrote:
A half-century later, everyone with an Internet connection owns a virtual press. And many of them scorn the journalism standards that have guided America’s mainstream media since before Liebling penned his famous aphorism. Among those standards: accuracy above all else, plus fairness, balance, thoroughness, independence, civility, decency, compassion and responsibility—along with a clear separation of news from opinion. Now, operators of some news-like websites unabashedly repeat rumors and throw accuracy to the wind. Vile, anonymous reader comments on mainstream media websites mock civility. Add the pressures of Internet speed and shrinking news staffs, and serious journalists wonder what kind of standards—if any—will prevail during the next 50 years.31
What people like Tom Price fail (or refuse) to understand is that the decentralization of information has increased transparency and accountability. To Old Media apologists, the infallibility of “serious journalists” is assumed, as is the cynical belief that bloggers are little more than hacks. The fact of the matter is that pajama-clad reporters are just as serious as Price’s deified newsmen, and reading news into a camera doesn’t mean you’re not a hack. The Internet gives news consumers an invaluable tool
to keep all the hacks in check—whether they’re in a newsroom in New York or a basement in Des Moines.
Centralized control of information is predicated on the notion that one person, organization, or industry can decide what is best for society. The Old Media still believe this, and they see themselves as the rightful disseminators of information and the sole purveyors of intellectualism and insight. In short, they think they’re smarter than the rest of us, and they view it as their duty to educate the unwashed masses about how things really work in Washington.
Again, this mentality is hardly exclusive to the Left. In a 2010 discussion about Old Media versus New Media, New York Times resident “conservative” David Brooks explained that the old model of journalism is better because the serious work of governing, and reporting on the process of governing, “isn’t a debating society. Usually there are 30 pressure groups pushing on each decision, and the outcome depends on a complex web of personalities and relationships. You can’t understand the flux of the forces unless you are inside the conversation.”32
Brooks admitted that the old model for journalism results in favors. “It is true that when you interview people you do develop relationships, and there is some pressure not to burn the people you admire and rely on. Nonetheless, I think the deal is worth it for the reader. In the first place, you learn what’s not true. Pundits who don’t do interviews often speculate on what is happening, but they usually don’t know what they are talking about. I’ll read some theory by a pundit about why something is happening, and I know it’s complete hokum because I just spoke with the people who are doing it.”33