From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Media Showers
Why would the public lose trust?
Last month--though it feels as if it were last year--a large Snowman (depicted below) got to ask the Democratic presidential candidates a question about global warming. CNN solicited questions through YouTube, the amateur video Web site, because YouTube is, in some as-yet-undefined sense, "the future." A senior CNN executive said, "There are questions that we, the journalists, we, the mainstream media, would never think to ask in the presidential debate." That's for sure. Afterward, there was commentary on whether the Snowman's video had dumbed down the political process.
More recently, Barack Obama has had to take time from his day to deal with "I Gotta Crush on Obama," a mildly suggestive video made by what press reports described as an actress. Then unto us came stories in the political "media" that Sen. Obama's young daughters were upset by the video. Sen. Obama spoke of the difficulty of insulating his family from "things like this."
These two events, however, are passing clouds compared to the debate over the role of the media in our time that has enlivened the summer in Britain. Readers will recall that some weeks ago this space discussed Tony Blair's criticisms of the modern media, both newspapers and television. The former prime minister said that the ramped-up pace of modern news had eroded the quality of public life, driving politicians into hasty decision-making about public events that are now invariably operating at the level of melodrama.
In a much-discussed speech last week at a large British TV conference, Jeremy Paxman, a well-known news interviewer for the BBC, remarked that the general reaction of the U.K. media to Mr. Blair's critique was: "Yah booh. You're a politician. We're media yahoos. Get over it." He demurred from the herd: "I'm sorry to say but I think there's something in all of these arguments." He urged his colleagues to get a grip and "stand back and ask what we're using this medium for."
A spate of scandals recently has put British TV at low ebb. A BBC promotional clip suggested the Queen had walked out in anger from a photo shoot with photographer Annie Leibowitz. False. Programs on other channels involving viewer telephone participation in quiz shows have been exposed as fraudulent. The BBC's news has been embroiled in controversy over the impartiality of its coverage, notably in the Middle East. Similar smelly bubbles reached the surface of the media swamp here during the 2004 election, when CBS and Dan Rather were unable to verify the authenticity of documents questioning George W. Bush's National Guard service.
All this has gotten the media into high anxiety over the one thing it presumes to value most: the public's trust. "The defining problem of contemporary television," the BBC's Mr. Paxman told the TV professionals last week, "is trust: Can you believe what you see on television, does television treat people fairly, is it healthy for society?"
Fascinating and worthwhile questions to be sure, insofar as most opinion polls of how much the American public "trusts" the press, TV news or even Congress have put their approval ratings in Lindsay Lohanland.
But for the media ponderers there's a more troubling issue than the restoration of trust. It's the possibility that too many people now simply don't much care about the major media anymore. Normally the great media combines would overcome periods of lassitude by forming up focus groups to tell them what to do next. Hah! They want "Survivor"! Alas, living as we do now in a world of seemingly infinite choice, it is possible not to care for a seeming infinity of reasons, which is why the established media are having such a hard time knowing what to do.
Mr. Paxman identified one reason not to care: "In the last quarter century we've gone from three channels to hundreds. . . . The truth is this: the more television there is, the less any of it matters." Once there was a time when TV announcers used to say, "Stay with us." Now no one stays. They go surfing, endlessly seeking a five-minute wave of TV that will take them just a little higher than the five minutes they just watched.
More difficult are the I-don't-care revolutionaries, who argue that digitization has reversed the media world's authority and power. The old aristocracy of programmers and editors has been overthrown by average people who now blog new political priorities, download media and form themselves into clickable communities. The Snowman wins. Get over it.
One part of me likes this scenario. Some say we're living out Marshall McLuhan's long-ago forecasts, such as, "The circuited city of the future . . . will be an information megalopolis." Could be. If it is so that these new technologies are redistributing power into millions of liberated hands accessing "what I want, when I want it," then we are also cruising toward what another seer predicted in three words: "Free to choose." That seer, of course, was Milton Friedman.
If indeed the Web and microprocessors have brought us to the doorstep of a Marshall-meets-Milton world of individual choice as a personal ideology, then record companies, newspapers and old TV networks aren't the only empires at risk. Public-school systems run by static teachers unions may find themselves abandoned by young parents from the Snowman's tribe, "accessing" K-8 education in unforeseen ways. Whose politics will that serve?
Big media and big politics are all flying through an electronic meteor shower just now, and not all will survive. But, like "Star Wars," it'll be fun to watch the carnage. The GOP candidates have their own CNN/YouTube debate in November. Most, after seeing a Snowman dominate the Democrats' debate, have been leery of the format. They should be. I wouldn't want to argue with a Snowman.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
