by Patricia Lee Sharpe
The New York Times picked up an odd feature story from the International Herald Tribune today, a story about blogs “as press gadfly sites” keeping the mainstream press in Europe on its toes. I was happy to learn we American bloggers have counterparts abroad, but I found myself puzzled by one paragraph:
The Web is a sprawling space that has spawned new breeds of digital gadflies like the Rojos [publishers of Periodista Digital in Spain] and an assortment of self-appointed cyber-monitors of the conventional news media in Europe.The word “self-appointed” is the odd part, especially if it’s meant to distinguish between bloggers and publishers of traditional newspapers or those who run the TV or even the film industry.
Deja vu is the phrase that comes to mind.
Back in the mid 1980s, when I was in Moscow stringing for RKO Radio and Cox News, the foreign correspondents who represented major US newspapers and big TV networks laughed at upstart CNN, which had opened a bureau in the Soviet capital. They laughed at Ted Turner, too, the “self-appointed” millionaire (or was it already a billion?) who had presumed to start a 24/7 TV news operation.
Then CNN scooped the rest of the media during the first Gulf War. The laughter stopped.
So far as I know, the print press in the United States is wholly in private hands, not licensed by government in any way. Many major newspapers are still controlled by the families of their founders, even where the heirs have been forced to raise cash by selling a carefully weighted percentage of shares. Publishers, editors, reporters–they’re all hired and fired by individuals who had enough money to found or keep on putting out a newspaper. It may take more capital to own a newspaper than a blog, but those who control the print press were and are “self-appointed.”
American TV and radio (with the noble but struggling exception of PBS and NPR) tend to be owned by larger corporations, often huge conglomerates, but their officers hold no official position in society. They haven’t been drafted. They haven’t been elected. In a very loose way, they are answerable to their owners, the shareholders, who in turn are also "self-appointed," in so far as they have simply bought into an enterprise that looks to earn them a good return.
That’s the whole point of private enterprise. You have an idea. You apply your entrepreneurial skills. You start small. You get big. You go corporate. Self-appointment all the way.
So there's a size difference, a capitalization difference, but not a "self-appointed" difference. Blogs like the rest of the media will stand or fall on the quality of their output.
The “self-appointed” label implies that some media have more legitimacy in the marketplace of ideas than others. It’s the equivalent of an ad hominem, a slight, an insult, an illegitimate though tempting and often effective way to eliminate competition.
It won’t work. Blogs of a zillion kinds are probably here to stay and will, I suspect, attract an ever larger readership by getting better and better. The technical term is market segmentation, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on which ("self-appointed") media theorist you are attending to. Only a superior news and entertainment product will marginalize blogs in the long run--or yet another, still unimaginable, technological revolution.