Scriptorium Daily
Bottom Line:
People who are afraid of change often resort to demonization of their opponents. This does not stop the change, but it makes them feel better.
The Old Media is dying in the self-righteous glow of the “new media” being silly. However, it is the Old Media that refuses to exercise the least judgment when it comes to presenting content from the new world.
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As Hugh Hewitt is ably pointing out, CNN disgraced itself with the 2007 You-Tube debate.
The questions asked, the bias of the questioners, and the entire format seem to justify an even greater criticism than Hewitt, generally an advocate of newer forms of media, gives. Doesn’t this prove the stupidity of the Internet? Doesn’t it confirm the curmudgeon’s observation that if television was a great wasteland of inanity that the Web is a swamp of stupidity awash in insanity?
It does not.
Fearful Reactions to New Media
Certain fearful preachers hear “Internet” and think “pornography.” They cannot see the good for the bad. While bad materials are more available than ever, so is the good.
We need easy tools to block being forced to see things we do not want to see, but no longer can virtue rely on paternalism to screen it from information.
We are all going to have to grow up. That I want to know a thing, or see it, and can know it and see it, will have to be carefully weighed against whether I should know or see it.
Can still does not equal ought even in the age of You-Tube.
Just as the poor can rely on their poverty to protect them from their immoderate desires, so previous generations could rely on their inability to access things to keep them from accessing them.
This generation is not less moderate than the last, it just has the information wealth to indulge in the vices previous generations could not.
In fact, there is a rising generation of young adults more virtuous than their grandparents because with the ability to know or do a thing, they choose not to do so.
They have learned virtue instead of being controlled.
Censorship must now be exercised at a personal level. Each corporation or community must filter and present the information it thinks has merit. There is nobody on the Web who will do this for an individual or a company.
This is a good thing.
But.
Liberty is useless, even harmful, if nobody is taught what to do with it.
We are in a new and better age where information liberty has arrived, but we educate our citizenry as if we lived in the old world.
Free men must learn self-censorship or their souls will be harmed by the trivial and the base.
Corporations must learn to screen out information or the useless stuff will overwhelm them. Mere data is no longer its own justification since data is no longer hard to produce or collect.
This is not a skill that had to be taught to individuals or corporations in the past. Managing information was more about getting information than it was about censoring a flood of information to get to the useful, the beautiful, the good, and the true stuff.
CNN Wants You-Tube to Be Stupid So CNN Can Survive
If you are in the old media, which censored the news for us, the new world is frightening indeed.
Like effete and decaying Edwardian London, the easiest thing is to parody rising New York City as full of rubes and idiots. This will sooth your nagging sense that all the energy, and even the best new things, are being done in the “colonies.”
It will not keep New York from passing London by as the cultural center of the world, but it feels good. (We see the same process in contemporary Atlantic Coast sneers about the Pacific Coast.)
CNN would like the Internet to be as foolish as they presented it in the You-Tube debate. They would like to think that the best way to present political opinion from the Web is to democratize it.
But surely that is foolish!
The Web simply reflects those on it. It is the job of each person producing content in the new media to manage what they use, who they cite, and what they think useful.
CNN does not realize this when it deals with new media. It is useful to its ego to democratize the selection process (choosing questions) and then act shocked when the selection turns out badly.
The Web itself is the populous, but each corporation must decide what is worthy of attention in that populous. The fact that someone wishes to ask a question posing as a snowman does not mean that a site need link to it or give it time.
I am as free to select what I give attention and link space as anybody ever was.
The fact that people want to ask inane questions gives them no right to do so on my web site.
CNN can and should continue to exercise editorial control of what it puts out. New Media site that do this will soon be trusted and grow in reputation and brand identity.
The rise of the Internet does not end the need for selection, it puts a premium on it.
CNN does not exercise due diligence when dealing with the You-Tube debate, because it is self-justifying to those in CNN who long for the old days when CNN could control not just their own editorial position, but much of the editorial position of individuals and corporations in the nation by their ability to control information.
The ability to control information is gone, so CNN wishes us to think this “loss” will swamp us in stupidity. They, therefore, throw out any editorial control.
Perhaps, just perhaps, they suspect that the secularist, left-of-the-American center bias they hold will not play to a broad enough market to support their salaries and sense of self-importance.
There is a market for their editorial brand, but it will not be as large as it has been when they controlled information.
CNN should get an editorial policy, publish it, and then look for the best of the Web to promote.
The old media should react to the new media by ending the pretense that their are the fountainhead of information and become guides to helping us select the valuable information.
We will learn who we can trust as guides . . . and pick guides we trust.
That will mean a market boom to some small outlets, but shrinkage to old giants who even if they do as I suggest will have to get used to being in “multiple paper” global city.
If CNN refuses to edit You-Tube in presenting a debate, somebody else will. They will run a center-right Republican debate that will find interesting and thoughtful commentators that have been overlooked in the past.
They will highlight the good and not give time to the foolish.
These folk are out there. They could check out some of the other God-Blog Convention speakers as a place to start.
I trust Hugh Hewitt, Joe Carter, and La Shawn Barber.
I know they are selecting information, but this is something a free person needs in the flood of data. I also read folk left-of-center, thoughtful secularists, and others with whom I have disagreements so that I am not too narrow. No site I visit frequently feels the need to give space on their personal sites to the merely foolish.
The new media forces every person, corporation, or non-profit to manage their own editorial policy. CNN (and the rest of the old media) would prefer that you believe that such liberty will always lead to folly.
Liberty is not an end, but a means to good ends. We have information liberty, now we will learn how to use that liberty to get to excellence.
