New Media Is Just as Good as the Old

In the Starr piece for this week, the author argued that the downfall of newspapers drastically changed the layout of the media and political landscapes in the United States. He also argued that this change was categorically negative. The former claim has seen substantial support from the continued development of online media; the latter claim, however, has only been underminded.

Starr argues that the downfall of newspapers signals the downfall of professional journalism, and therefore, the downfall of legitimate sources of information for public consumption. Purely online outlets, such as Politico and Talking Points Memo, however, belie this claim. In addition, new forms of journalism and editorial processes have begun to emerge to provide a level of legitimacy to the new journalistic landscape. Some sites, such as The Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics, provide an overview of the highlights of more traditional media outlets while mixing in some of the more credible stories that emerge from new media outlets. Other sites have decided to fully embrace the networking benefits of the Internet and have done away with even the minimal role for elites in deciding which stories and sources are legitimate and credible that is saved for them by sites such as Drudge and RealClear. Reddit.com, for example, relies on its users to provide content for the site by uploading links to stories or pages stored elsewhere on the Internet and also allows its users to decide the order in which posts are displayed, thus allowing posts that are rated more highly by users to become more and more prominent on the site. Because of the norms established among users, the prime criterion used by the vast majority of users is not whether they agree with the substance of a post, but whether it is intelligent and insightful, allowing for a rough equivalency to be established between popularity and quality of information and analysis. In addition, sites such as Wikileaks provide an outlet for the whistle-blowing journalism that Starr assumes will disappear without the economic strength of newspapers to back them up.

Yes, the Internet has overseen drastic changes in the media landscape, chief among which is the significant weakening of many newspapers. Starr's categorization of these changes as a decrease in quality and efficacy, however, is not correct. The new media landscape is categorically different from the old, but is definitely still up to the task of helping citizens to be informed and hold their government accountable for its decisions and outcomes.