A reader passed on a link to a Michael Skube Op-Ed piece in Sunday's Los Angeles Times. Skube is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and educator. In his Sunday essay, Skube argued that the blogosphere is far too filled with noise - the rants of cranks with too much time on their hands - and lacks the objectivity that professional journalism provides.
Skube quoted the late historian Christopher Lasch in support of his argument:
"What democracy requires," Lasch wrote in "The Lost Art of Argument," "is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can only be generated by debate. We do not know what we need until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy."There was something appealing about this argument -- one that no blogger would reject -- when Lasch advanced it almost two decades ago.
But now we have the opportunity to witness it in practice, thanks to the blogosphere, and the results are less than satisfying. One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks.
Truth be told, the Insider has been guilty of some of those very same negative characteristics at times. We also agree with Lasch's sentiment that skepticism is a worthy trait and that it's not information we're lacking so much as a context into which to place that information and understand it.
We also agree that bloggers, including the Insider are not the same as professional journalists, who still fill an important function. Nor do we see ourselves necessarily in competition with journalists so much as filling an informational niche unmet by newspapers, magazines, and broadcast and Internet news.
As we've noted in past posts, on the local level, news and context are often lacking. The corporatization of the news business has left entire communities bereft of local papers.
Town newspapers like the Claremont Courier have become rarer, even though indications are that family-owned local papers may be better suited to surviving the current business environment precisely because they provide very specific news to a specific audience.
And because a paper like the Courier is family-owned, it doesn't have to answer to Wall Street's shareholder expectations the way a large corporation like the Tribune Co. does. As a result, family-owned papers can operate on lower margins that a paper like the LA Times.
In any event, we really don't see blogs as belong to the same philosophical category as journalism. We recognize we exist simply to provide an outlet for opinions about the local scene that we think have been ignored for a good 20 years or so. Ironically, we think we provide some of the skepticism about the Claremont scene that Skube believes is needed in the blogosphere.
Too often in our recent history, Claremont, particularly its city government and the Claremont 400, have been allowed to simply dictate the news through press releases that went unexamined, and we aim to shine a light into those dark areas. We believe there's been too little of the sort of local public debate that Lasch referred to, and too much of a willingness to accept the conventional wisdom.
Claremont's strength is in being possessed of a community that's more involved as a whole than a lot of others in the area, and that community's opinion is far more diverse than the Claremont 400 has traditionally acknowledged. The 400 speak of "consensus" in the academic sense, implying agreement reached after vigorous argument and debate. But they are really talking about their desire to force their one point of view on this community, to suppress diverse thinking.
When people like former Mayors Diann Ring, Judy Wright or former commissioner Helaine Goldwater haunt city hall and manipulate policy behind the scenes, they truly believe they represent an institutional memory and see themselves as providing continuity in decision-making. What they don't see is how they also end up keeping new ideas from receiving a fair hearing and how they stifle innovative-thinking.
When they talk of "diversity" they are usually speaking of ethnic and cultural diversity, but not ideological diversity. They want a community that looks different but thinks exactly alike. We, however, think that ideological diversity remains our greatest virtue, and we aim to provide an outlet for that on local issues, from affordable housing to fiscal policy, from open space to local services. And we'll gladly stop posting tomorrow if the Claremont 400 ceases its political gamesmanship and steps aside to allow others to have a fair and equal say in city governance.
Absent that, we say, until tomorrow, dear readers.
Posts
