Whisperings from Whispered Pearls

The brickbats are flying fast and furious about the death of newspapers.

Having been a recent victim of a newspaper’s layoffs, I have a few things of my own to say about all this. I also consider myself to be deeply ensconced in new media, and have a few things to say about that, too. 

I wanted to comment on an article that I have posted on my Facebook, link here: http://www.maxgladwell.com/2008/12/media-landscape-newspapers/ 

Max Gladwell, who already doesn’t understand social media enough to have a comments section attached to his dissertation (sigh), makes a case about the death of newspapers. What he posits is that newspapers shouldn’t die because they are still the Fourth Estate, the ones responsible for holding the government’s feet to the fire. To which I say: where has this Fourth Estate been in the last eight years then? Where are the angry epithets about all of the war crimes committed by the current men in power? As our habeus corpus was taken away, where was the outrage of that Fourth Estate? Did it reach to anyone other than the few journalists who knew what it meant? Torture? At Guantanamo and elsewhere? Where was the commentary about that? Global warming, and the corporations that condone it? And on and on.

To those ends, I say, the newpapers’ power to effect change has already transferred hands, in case Mr. Gladwell’s not noticed it. The news that affects people, gets into their system, makes them take political action, is already happening more on Facebook, MySpace and blogs than from reading any newspaper. WE the PEOPLE have become the Fourth Estate. We talk about things that are wrong with our government, and do something about it, as Obama’s largely Internet-fueled election proved. The newspapers, also in case you haven’t noticed, are firmly in the pockets of the land barons, the rich profiteers, the corporations who are carrying out the very things we need to be railing against.  We, we who still care about our country, are out here, carrying messages hand to hand, if necessary (well, ok, maybe with the little help of an iPhone) to tell others the truth.

We blog it, we podcast it, we status it on FB, we tweet it on Twitter. The thirst for real news will never die. But the place we look for it has already changed. And I would have told Mr. Gladwell that, if only he was new media-savvy enough to have a comments section.