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in the public interest
From Marconi to Murrow to - Drudge?
By Lawrence K. Grossman
Lawrence K. Grossman is a former president of NBC News and PBS.
In one of those end-of-the-millennium features designed to fill space on a slow news day, Agence France Presse, the world’s oldest wire service, picked ten top media events of this media-saturated century. Among the movers and shakers included in AFP’s list were Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio; John L. Baird, the inventor of television; Edward R. Murrow, whose See It Now launched nationwide television programming in the United States; Ted Turner, who created CNN, and — hold on to your hat — Matt Drudge, who aired Monicagate on his own self-published Internet scandal-sheet.
Why Drudge? Actually, AFP made a shrewd choice. The Walter Winchell wannabe is the harbinger of the shape of the press to come in the century ahead. With a modem, anyone with no training or credentials, like Drudge, who works on a laptop from his apartment in Los Angeles, can deliver the news of the world to a global audience.
Gutenberg made us all readers. Radio and television made us all firsthand observers. Xerox made us all publishers. The Internet makes us all journalists, broadcasters, columnists, commentators, and critics.
To update A.J. Leibling’s classic crack about freedom of the press belonging to those who own one: in the next century freedom of the press could belong to everyone, at least everyone who owns a modem. The digital age, it appears, will be a paradoxical mix of oligopoly and anarchy. Media power is increasingly concentrating in the hands of a few monolithic corporate gatekeepers like AT&T, Time Warner, NBC, Disney, Microsoft, and AOL. Yet in the cyberworld, an individual maverick gatecrasher like Matt Drudge can reach millions online around the globe.
Notwithstanding
the utopian hype of cyber-enthusiasts like Esther Dyson, George Gilder, and
Nicholas Negroponte, the Web still has a long way to go before it becomes a
mainstream source of news and information, displacing conventional networks,
stations, newspapers, and newsmagazines. But the Internet is fast muscling its
way into the once restricted precincts of the professional press.
We’re flooded with firsthand information, insights, and eyewitness accounts of the Serbian conflict, not only from the professional corps of print and broadcast reporters but also from ordinary people — amateurs with computers, modems, cell phones, digital cameras, and access to e-mail — who dispatch their own descriptions of what’s happening to a rapidly expanding audience online. The riveting and insightful e-mail dialogue between two high school students, one in Kosovo, the other in Berkeley, was recycled in newspapers and read throughout the country. Using Web sites and chat groups on the Internet, monks, farmers, housewives, paramilitary leaders, and propagandists in Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro tell, with various degrees of accuracy and trustworthiness, about what’s happening in the beleaguered cities, towns, and refugee camps. The New York Times described the cyber-correspondents in Serbia as an alternative news source. Newsweek, with characteristic hyperbole, called the Web, "a vivid mirror of the struggle for Kosovo, a first in war."
Nor is it only online reports from new-age correspondents in remote news centers like Kosovo that attract attention. Amazon.com encourages ordinary readers to e-mail book reviews for sharing with millions who tap into its Web site. Amazon’s Web site now offers the largest single collection of literary criticism and book reviews anywhere. Its reader-reviewers may not all be of the caliber of those in The New York Review of Books or The Los Angeles Times Book Review. But their publication in cyberspace influences purchasers, creates a community of readers, and helps Amazon attract customers and sell books. Last time I looked, my own book, The Electronic Republic, had some half-dozen thoughtful reviews posted on Amazon, including one "five-star" customer critique from a woman in Bozeman, Montana. Amazon’s listing for John Grisham’s bestseller The Testament included more than 300 customer reviews. The virtual retailer plans to follow the same highly successful participatory pattern as it expands into online sales of music and movies. By inviting comments and criticism from everyone, Amazon and others add legions of new reviewers to the once elite back-of-the-book journalism of professional movie and music critics.
The process of radically realigning the conventional world of the "fourth estate" has only just begun. Every TV station is required by law to go digital by 2003. Digital TV not only will bring crystal-clear pictures and hundreds of additional channels but also will make television sets interactive, like personal computers. In the digital era, amateur reporters as well as pros, "real people" as well as certified pundits, outsiders as well as insiders, ordinary observers as well as authentic experts, will be able to file their own videos and eyewitness reports to the world via Web sites and chat groups on the Internet. Notwithstanding their lack of professional training in journalism’s canons of objectivity, accuracy, and fairness, some, like Matt Drudge, are bound to become the next century’s media stars.
Yes, professional standards will fall when the floodgates open to reporters-without-training, broadcasters-without-credentials, and pundits-without-editors. (For many, the tabloid press, both print and electronic, has already descended to that low point.) But the digital age also has the potential to provide an unprecedented richness of new sources of information, diversity of views, and variety of perspectives. It’ll be up to the consumer to sort out the coherent and credible from the fraudulent and demented — an environment in which an earned reputation for journalistic professionalism will obviously get a leg up.
For all the buffoons and charlatans who will undoubtedly join the new-age virtual press corps, audiences at home will also have the opportunity to hear directly from university scholars; authorities from the Library of Congress and elsewhere; experts and advocates from think tanks with points of view worth considering; and newcomers with unconventional ideas.
With everyone a potential journalist, broadcaster, columnist, commentator, and critic in the twenty-first century, it’ll be a media jungle out there, both for better and worse. Matt Drudge’s enshrinement in the pantheon of this century’s media giants demonstrates that fact all too well.
