Nick Kristof Sees, Hears & Speaks No Evil

Nick Kristof opined today about how people tend to gravitate and lend credence to ideas with which they already agree. That’s undoubtedly true for the majority, and he’s right to say it’s troublesome as it pertains to the level of discourse in this country:

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about. Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves. That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

I agree with this so far; Nick has the facts right, but he errs when he suggests that what we need is more "traditional" media coverage to maintain the proper perspective:

The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected “news” acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays.

If the news is delivered in a straightforward way, then there’s nothing to really agree or disagree with. How do you argue with facts? Sure, people will always self-select opinion pieces for either reverence or wrath, but that’s an entirely different animal than straight news as it's delivered by the "traditional media." What does he expect news consumers to do when they feel like the product is flawed? They’re bound to go looking not just for like-minded news outlets, as people like Mr. Kristof like to put it, but for more accurate reporting, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

In a perfect world, writers and editors at traditional media outlets would in some way correlate their loss of readership with poor product quality. But there are so many factors at play in the decline of dead-tree papers that they take the easy road and blame Craigslist.com and "The Daily Me" for their financial woes. That kind of rationalization is just easier on the ego.

People who already lean to the left make the mistake of thinking that traditional outlets like The New York Times are, to quote Dan Rather from Bernard Goldberg’s Bias, “middle of road.” Those people are already in an echo chamber, and they see everything that doesn’t fall into their sphere of interest or opinion as biased to the right. Since traditional newsrooms are populated by one overpowering ideological group, they’re all interested in similar stories, which means they’re not covering countless others. Naturally some stories merit more attention, but after a while it starts to look like a report’s reputation within his or her industry is built on never being afraid to ask the really tough questions… of republicans. When news consumers don’t see their news outlets playing the watchdog with equal vigor, they recognize the prejudice and reject the product.

I think what Nick fails to realize is that he’s actually lamenting the fact that the traditional media is losing its ability to filter the news, and thus shape the national conversation. We’ll see more of this in the next few years as the blogosphere (particularly the rightosphere) becomes more successful at thrusting news into the national conversation. Armies of self-rightous journalists will blabber on and on about how everyone has an opinion nowadays, and we're in dire need of federal legislation to establish a uniform credentialing process so news consumers can properly distinguish between those who have the proper perspective to cover the news responsibly, and those who are mere amateurs frothing at the keyboard.

By then, government intervention in journalism will evolve into a good thing for the profession, as ludicrous as it sounds. But, sadly, those feats of logical and moral gymnastics are easy when you think like the Times’ editorial board.