Bush had manipulated his military record, the assertion seemed as though it might be the turning point for the Kerry campaign, which had been running behind in the polls. The viewership for
That night, as the
MacDougald’s post quickly attracted attention, and the discussion about the forgeries jumped to two other blog communities,
Rathergate is now an enduring part of the mythology about the way blogs and the Internet have changed the game of journalism. No matter where you stand on the politics involved, it’s an inspiring tale: MacDougald, an activist on a home computer, discovered the truth, took down one of the biggest figures in journalism, and changed the course of an election.
But this version of the story omits a critical point.
In the twelve days between CBS’s airing of the story and its public acknowledgment that the documents were probably fakes, the rest of the broadcast news media turned out reams of reportage. The Associated Press and
It is only because these news sources reached many of the same people who watch CBS News that CBS could not afford to ignore the story. MacDougald and his allies may have lit the match, but it took print and broadcast media to fan the flames into a career-burning conflagration.
Rathergate, in other words, is a good story about how online and broadcast media can interact. But it tells us little or nothing about how news will move once the broadcast era is fully over—and we’re moving toward that moment at a breakneck pace. The question we have to ask is, What does news look like in the postbroadcast world? How does it move? And what impact does it have?
If the power to shape news rests in the hands of bits of code, not professional human editors, is the code up to the task? If the news environment becomes so fragmented that MacDougald’s discovery can’t reach a broad audience, could Rathergate even happen at all?
Before we can answer that question, it’s worth quickly reviewing where our current news system came from.
The Rise and Fall of the General Audience
Lippmann, in 1920, wrote that “the crisis in western democracy is a crisis in journalism.” The two are inextricably linked, and to understand the future of this relationship, we have to understand its past.
It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when “public opinion” didn’t exist. But as late as the mid-1700s, politics was palace politics. Newspapers confined themselves to commercial and foreign news—a report from a frigate in Brussels and a letter from a nobleman in Vienna set in type and sold to the commercial classes of London. Only when the modern, complex, centralized state emerged—with private individuals rich enough to lend money to the king—did forward-looking officials realize that the views of the people outside the walls had begun to matter.
The rise of the public realm—and news as its medium—was partly driven by the emergence of new, complex societal problems, from the transport of water to the challenges of empire, that transcended the narrow bounds of individual experience. But technological changes also made an impact. After all, how news is conveyed profoundly shapes what is conveyed.
While the spoken word is always directed to a specific audience, the written word—and especially the printing press—changed all that. In a real sense, it made the general audience possible. This ability to address a broad, anonymous group fueled the Enlightenment era, and thanks to the printing press, scientists and scholars could spread complex ideas with perfect precision to an audience spread over large distances. And because everyone was literally on the same page, transnational conversations began that would have been impossibly laborious in the earlier scribe-driven epoch.
In the American colonies, the printing industry developed at a fierce clip—at the time of the revolution, there was no other place in the world with such a density and variety of newspapers. And while they catered exclusively to the interests of white male landowners, the newspapers nonetheless provided a common language and common arguments for dissent. Thomas Paine’s rallying cry,
Early newspapers existed to provide business owners with information about market prices and conditions, and newspapers depended on subscription and advertising revenues to survive. It wasn’t until the 1830s and the rise of the “penny press”—cheap newspapers sold as one-offs on the street—that everyday citizens in the United States became a primary constituency for news. It was at this point that newspapers came to carry what we think of as news today.
The small, aristocratic public was transforming into a general public. The middle class was growing, and because middle-class people had both a day-to-day stake in the life of the nation and the time and money to spend on entertainment, they were hungry for news and spectacle. Circulation skyrocketed. And as education levels went up, more people came to understand the interconnected nature of modern society. If what happened in Russia could affect prices in New York, it was worth following the news from Russia.
But though democracy and the newspaper were becoming ever more intertwined, the relationship wasn’t an easy one. After World War I, tensions about what role the newspaper should play boiled over, becoming a matter of great debate among two of the leading intellectual lights of the time, Walter Lippmann and John Dewey.
Lippmann had watched with disgust as newspapers had effectively joined the propaganda effort for World War I. In
Lippmann wrote that so long as newspapers existed and they determined “by entirely private and unexamined standards, no matter how lofty, what [the average citizen] shall know, and hence what he shall believe, no one will be able to say that the substance of democratic government is secure.”
Over the next decade, Lippmann advanced his line of thought. Public opinion, Lippmann concluded, was too malleable—people were easily manipulated and led by false information. In 1925, he wrote
John Dewey, one of the great philosophers of democracy, couldn’t pass up the opportunity to engage. In