Media Guidance Systems: Colliding In Cyberspace

It often seems that the mainstream news media are more enthralled with cyberspace than cyberspace is — and that's saying something!

Media outlets often have an inflated sense of their own importance. By tacitly or explicitly posing as the preeminent window on the world, a particular medium is apt to tout itself as the most important source of information and ideas.

After the World Wide Web caught on a dozen years ago, print and broadcast media did more than a little carping and sneering at the specter of the Internet competing with more traditional outlets. The wise hands would need to be at work, we were often told, to help us separate the digital wheat from the chaff.

When MSNBC went into operation nearly 11 years ago — heralded as an unprecedented joint effort of a big cable TV network and a major Web site — the ballyhooed partnership between NBC and Microsoft seemed to affirm the Web's fast-growing clout. At the same time, Tom Brokaw, as NBC's leading television anchor, stepped forward to warn against perils of the new technology.

The dangers were particularly acute for young people, Brokaw told an interviewer: "We can't let that generation and a whole segment of the population just slide away out to the Internet and retrieve what information it wants without being in on it."

Brokaw added that he and his colleagues would come to the rescue: "I also believe strongly that the Internet works best when there are gatekeepers — when there are people making determinations and judgments about what information is relevant and factual and useful. Otherwise, it's like going to the rainforest and just seeing a green maze."

Those words jumped out at me when Brokaw uttered them in mid-1996. They seemed to epitomize the arrogance of many entrenched mainline journalists who were making a lot of money while serving — often with notable arrogance — the interests of their corporate employers.

Brokaw, after all, did his star turn anchoring "NBC Nightly News" with a regular feature called "The Fleecing of America" — decrying "how your government is wasting your money." But while the program served as the news crown jewel of a network owned by the behemoth firm General Electric, it had very little to say about "how corporate America is ripping you off."

A decade later, such critiques still stand.

In the interim, on the whole, TV news has gotten even worse — more subservient to big investors, bottom-line-obsessed managers and major advertisers — while the Internet has moved in a multiplicity of directions.

On the one hand, leveraged from the top down, cyberspace is more corporatized and corrupted than ever. Advertising and less obvious funding pressures have tilted the sorts of information, opinions and products that are most readily available. Yet, from the bottom up, countless listservs and Web sites are being put to good use by individuals and groups seeking to enliven public discourse with decentralized sources of information and analysis.

In the natural world, life thrives on genuine ecological diversity. In the media world, democracy thrives on genuine informational diversity — or withers in the midst of conformist homogeneity.

During the last several years, countless stories have hyped the Web while paying tribute to its financial dynamism, social impacts and ascending role in politics. The lines between "traditional" and "digital" media are blurring and sometimes disappearing. Yet fascination with innovative technology has often focused attention on form over substance.

Let's stipulate, as the lawyers say, that means of communication are becoming evermore amazing. Sooner or later — and let's hope it's sooner — the residual novelty of the latest computer technologies will wear off. In news media, and throughout much of the social realm, the commercialized drums beat incessantly to celebrate the digital glitz of smaller-faster-easier dazzling devices. We can use them to say whatever we want. But what do we really want to say?

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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