Georgie Ann Geyer seemingly attempts to blame blogs for people having limited knowledge of the world because it causes people to pick and choose their news and it’s leading to the decline in that knowledge.
Think for a moment of what might have happened had we had better (really, any) coverage of Afghanistan during the 1990s, when the Taliban and Osama bin Laden were cooking up a second attack after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Could we then have been so amazed by 9/11? Wasn’t it criminally irresponsible to be so amazed?
Think a little further. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world — the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week — it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people.
Empirically, there is a big problem with this argument–largely people have always had little knowledge about the world and they even have less ability to fit that knowledge into a systemized understanding of the world. The data over time are consistent that the norm is a low level of knowledge about world affairs. This hasn’t changed since the beginnings of the research on public opinion in the 1950s–supposedly the hey day of great newspapers.
The dumbest thing to do is to blame blogs and blog reader who, by the very fact they read some news, are well ahead of the average person on the street.
Let me offer a different argument–news organizations drawing upon the tools of blogging are making themselves more accessible and improving access to news–Eric Zorn not only writes his column, but points people to stories around the web in other news sources. Lynn Sweet adds full text of briefings and interviews instead of synopses in columns. They do need to figure out a business model that works on the web, but that’s not the fault of bloggers.
Technology allows me to read far more papers every day than I could when I couldn’t access them online. I may not read every story, but I didn’t when I only had a dead tree version either. The larger problem is that people are happy and so many don’t read news because they have other options for their time.
Reading newspapers didn’t exactly help people to be better informed when the newspapers were parroting the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMDs, did it?