Re: Rebooting The News #16

Lyn Headley — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:17:30 -0000

This is fantastic and I'll spare you the praise, except to say
I'm struck by a shared concern for the art of conversation: I saw
the show itself as a conversation shepherded by two exquisite
conversationalists. My critique is that y'all are dichotomizing
omniscience and "here's where I'm coming from" a bit sharply.
Aren't these two poles of a continuum?

Historically perhaps the dichotomy is valid; we're emerging from a
period of "excess objectivity" and learning how to incorporate
multiple perspectives. But in terms of method, news will always seek
out a kind of reliable perspective that is essentially shared and not
individual. The question for rebooters is how to best achieve this
shared reliability -- and how to incorporate a diversity of
perspectives as essential elements of it. (cf. Jay's origin story --
Starting from the premise that participation is an essential component
of journalism).

Walter Lippman identified an early version of the problem in 1922:

The powerful, socially superior, successful, rich, urban social set is
fundamentally international throughout the western hemisphere and in
many ways London is its center. It counts among its membership the
most influential people in the world, containing as it does the
diplomatic set, high finance, the upper circles of the army and the
navy, some princes of the church, a few great newspaper proprietors,
their wives and mothers and daughters who wield the scepter of
invitation. It is at once a great circle of talk and a real social
set. But its importance comes from the fact that here at last the
distinction between public and private affairs practically
disappears. The private affairs of this set are public matters, and
public matters are its private, often its family affairs. The
confinements of Margot Asquith like the confinements of royalty are,
as the philosophers say, in much the same universe of discourse as a
tariff bill or a parliamentary debate.

So the challenge for rebooters is to split this center of intersection
between public and private into multiple centers which together add up
to a higher, more reliable, more democratic union. IMHO, that is.

Thanks for a great show.

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Re: Rebooting The News #16