Maureen Dowd: “bla blah bler bleurgh”

Dowd’s Op-Ed piece was as banal and provocative as usual this morning. But it was also self-serving in a particularly aggravating way, another instance of whiney journos complaining about how the Internet is unfairly ruining their profit margins (albeit disguised by a jocular manner intended to show that really she's not angry. No, really.) Google and Craigslist have “hijacked journalism,” Dowd explains. Has Google a right, she asks – as if the phrasing of the question did not make clear Dowd’s view of the answer – “to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy”?

The message is no different to the moans from music distributors about Napster, or a hundred other ways in which traditional media have been screwed by a distribution mechanism which, at root, reveals how little it is that the traditional media do. (Indeed, it’s really not that far from the self-righteous justifications for bonuses at hedge funds, either. They’re all presuming that the value of their service is absolute and large, and not a function of the market and liable to being superseded.)

Face it, this is sour grapes, not a genuine argument. In a deliberate McLuhanite fudge, these groups are intentionally occluding the difference between the medium and the message. Journalism isn’t in jeopardy, newsprint is. Napster didn’t put music in jeopardy, it just screwed CD retailers and distributors. You can’t defend the print press on the grounds of their commitment to investigative journalism, since investigative journalists are doing pretty well on websites and blogs these days, since virtually none of the investment in the press goes into investigative journalism, and since mainstream investment in investigative journalism has been consistently declining over the past decade as the press dumbed down and put pictures of Angelina Jolie on the front cover in the hope of playing to the audience’s jockstraps.

The real problem is not that everyone can steal content from the New York Times, it’s that with the direct AP wire feed or the corporate press release available at a single click of a button, the Internet has made it possible to see how little genuine editorial work or creativity has gone into most journalistic output. (There are great exceptions, of course, but they are undoubtedly exceptions.) You can even now trace the same sentences moving from press release to wire service to mainstream media. If you think what you do is really so valuable, go ahead and charge for it. And we'll go somewhere else.

And don’t talk to me about opinion. Yes, Maureen, you can come up with opinionated guff on a regular basis. But so can the rest of us: and I and my internet buddies don’t expect a whopping great salary for spouting off the views we so carefully researched down the pub last night. We freely admit their value is largely determined by the community they reside in, and nothing more.

In a sideswipe clearly unrelated to the core argument about stolen earnings, meanwhile Dowd points out that Google is also a “leader in stripping away privacy”. OH MY GOD. I know that the US press isn’t as bad as the British tabloids, but give me a break, will you? The newspaper industry has been at the forefront of pushing back the private sphere for at least two centuries, right back to when it started circulating spurious rumours (that turned out to be true) about Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings. Now the Internet comes along and does it better, and all of a sudden its gripey gripey moaney moan.

Grow up, face the music. The new system provides better value for money than the old one. Information is distributed better. Redundant functionality is replaced. People are freer to express their opinions. Ideas can spread more quickly and effectively. Your old monopoly on the channel of distribution is close to cardiac arrest. And, frankly, no-one in their right mind is going to be sorry to see it go.

Leave a Comment