The "New Media" vs. "Old Media" Debate

by Cliopatria

I suppose that Rebunk counts as part of the new media. OK, we review movies months after they appear, we get into unseemly shouting matches with other blogs, and a good number of our links come from the old media in new skins, by which I mean the online versions of newspapers. Nonetheless our quality control is lax and we can make fun of Dr. Phil without facing his burly murderous man-breast wrath, so I guess that counts as “new media.”

Yet sometimes the new media takes itself a bit too seriously, particularly in its proclamations that it is changing the world. (See Sullivan, Andrew.) Today’s Dallas Morning News has an editorial that has been a long time in coming. Basically, the familiar charge of those who most trumpet the idea of the “new media” as a vanguard bravely storming the castles of retrograde “old media” is that the “old media” (I am using the scare quotation marks with irony attendant; I hate scare quotation marks) does not cover (Choose one or more) 1) Big business/government perfidy dear to the accuser’s heart; 2)"Good News" – they only focus on bad news that makes us/me/people I support/causes I embrace look bad; 3) The Real News, whatever that means.

There is a problem with this. As the DMN editorial shows, the accusation is often butt-naked wrong. Indeed, almost every time I hear about one of these stories that has allegedly been ignored by the major media it takes approximately 8.5 seconds to find old media coverage that antedates the Brave New Media’s supposed scoop. In other words: The assertion is often baseless and may well be an outright falsehood. And if the story has not been covered, the reason often is not some deep, dark conspiracy on the part of the news media. The explanation might be simple: There is not enough to the story to amount to a pisshole in the snow, as my grandfather would have said.

This is not to say that blogs and websites and chat-rooms and list serves and whatever else makes up this “new media” do not make up a wonderful and exciting outlet. It is to say that many of the accusations levied at the “old media,” which oftentimes does a pretty damned good job of setting up their own online sites, blogs, chatrooms, and whatever else, are not worth the bandwidth on which they are printed. And if at times the new media is ahead of the curve, shouldn’t that be a good thing for all of us who want as much openness as possible? They would be rather useless if all of these new sources did not bring something new other than a snarky attitude and bad hygiene to the table.

comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:

Derek Charles Catsam - 1/27/2005

I still think that the problem is supposing that this is an ideological problem and not a matter of something being left on the editor's floor, on a sloppy job, or anything else. It is always problematic to assign ideology without evidence. One could suppose that the reason why Fox has had 1/3rd the coverage od the tsunamis is that conservative ideology is the explanation, and that conservatives ergo are unsymoathetic or hate foreigners. there mya be a morew charitable explanation, however, and I'd prefer to find that lacking evidence of ideologically-driven malfeasance.
dc

Richard Henry Morgan - 1/27/2005

I don't think the sloppy reporting done by the Globe, the Times, or Time, would be done by a less mass-oriented and more specialized magazine, such as Science. Blogs don't uniformly outperform traditional mass media on that score -- they may even be worse on average for all I know. But particular blogs can reflect particular expertise, just like Science. The interesting thing, as far as I can tell, is that ideology performs its understood function in the Time piece: there isn't coverage of the full spectrum of opinion, and ideology takes the place of facts, as a frame for the story. You show me a J-school where they don't teach you to seek out varying opinions in a piece. Yet J-school 101 seems to be precisely what is missing from the Time piece.

Derek Charles Catsam - 1/27/2005

I'm not convinced that one articles is evidence of anything. unless you are saying that blogs etc. never make mistakes, in which case you have a hell of a case to prove. A Time article that shows sloppiness and disagrees with your politics does not seem quite sufficient to condemn the overwhelming mass of what we call "the media."
dc

Richard Henry Morgan - 1/27/2005

For a taste on how some Old Media handled the Summers story, look no further than the current Time magazine. It has Summers saying that "innate differences might help explain why fewer women succeed in math and science ..." Actually, he said it might help explain why they are under-represented in leadership positions at the top of the sciences.

Time then goes on to quote Nancy Hopkins, a top biologist at MIT (Time doesn't mention she is a member of the NAS):"It's not appropriate for the man who holds in his hands the future of the brightest minds in America to say that 50% don't have the right aptitude".

A not very clever undergraduate could point out that not only has Time misconstrued his remarks, but Hopkins went one further. Fine. It's not the job of Time to ride herd on every quote, and show how it is wrong. But nowhere in the article is there a single quote in defense of Summers, as were provided by Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology there, or any number of female professors at Harvard.

There's no a priori reason why the extraordinary sex ratios at the upper end of math scores wouldn't have SOME effect on distribution of professors by sex in science institutions. If academic science (and other scientific) institutions are even a rough sorting mechanism by math aptitude, one would likely see precisely the pattern (but not precisely the numbers) put forward by Prof. Kemp: lesser and and lesser representation of females in sciences as you climb the scientific hierarchy.

The article does point to one other factor: Summers' decision to tenure "rising young scholars". As a group of female Harvard faculty put it, females tend to mature in their scholarship later, which puts them at a disadvantage with this change. Just what motivated the change isn't clear. Harvard had a rep for stingy tenure and high workloads for junior faculty, making it tougher and tougher to attract entry-level tenure track candidates at the highest level, again making it harder to grant tenure, etc., etc., in a vicious circle. Whatever the explanation, it seems rather implausible that Harvard, the red-hot center of PC in the Universe, engages in sexual discrimination at a level higher than a local community college.

I think if you compare coverage, you'll find more complete and better coverage of the issues at the Crimson and at volokh.com, then you'll find at such major institutions as the Boston Globe, the Times, and Time.

Stephen Tootle - 1/26/2005

I have been thinking that the New Media is actually more like the Old Old Media. Lots of mom and pop places (or just mom, or pop) with no central control, no AP wires, and lots of ideologically driven opinion. Student just came in. Will finish thought later.

Derek Charles Catsam - 1/26/2005

Rob --
That's a great question. I tried to alude to it when I pointed out that the "old media" has managed to take on a lot of the accoutrements of what we would call "new media" but let me be a bit more frontal: I think, in a lot of ways, that the distinction comes from those who consider themselves to be practitioners of the New media. In other words, much as the "New Left" derived that term self-consciously to differentiate themselves from the "Old Left," the "New media" has self identified as such. So I guess I use the scare quotes because, like you seem to be, I am skeptical of this differentiation.

One of my concerns is that we should all care more about GOOD media than the mode in which we get it. In other words, aside from its many troubles in the past few years, the New York Times is still a pretty damned good newspaper. So too is the Wall Street Journal. I am more concerned with quality than, say, ideologically drivenm witch hunts, because I think that on a day-to-day basis ideological matters take a distant back seat to breaking stories, raking the muck, and all that.
And so all that said, I would consider the DMN or Times or Boston Globe or Washington Times websites to be logical extensions of what their newspapers represent ina time of new technology. I'm pretty certain that even without blogs, the websites of newspapers would look s they do, that the technological advancements opened up opportunities that the Times would have explored even if andrewsullivan.com had never existed.

In other words, if Blog had not existed, we'd have had to have invented him.

Sorry. That was awful.

dc

Robert Wisler - 1/26/2005

Derek,

I am just curious, but how do you, personally, differentiate between new and old media? Would you consider any website as "new media"? Pretty much every paper/tv station/radio station that may be considered "old media" (scare quotes are fun, aren't they?)now have websites, and some even contain mini-sites within these sites with something that may be considered "new media" such as weblogs.
I am just curious as to whether or not, for example, you would consider the DMN's website as "new" or "old" media.

Rob