Last week, the DNC announced the launch of “The Accountability Project,” a new website volunteer project “to hold Republican candidates accountable for their claims, their public statements, and their campaign tactics.” To call the project “grassroots” while a banner at the bottom of the page states that the site is paid for by the Democratic National Committee is surely pushing the frontiers of shamelessness; but desperate times call for desperate measures. For citizen journalists have been making the news as well as reporting in recent weeks, and not in ways favorable to the left.
On the reporting front, the career of far-left journalist Helen Thomas was ended by a camera-wielding Rabbi posting footage of her anti-Semitic rantings on his website. Meanwhile, conservative citizen journalists have been physically assaulted, notably by Democrat representative Bob Etheridge and at a campaign event for Illinois senatorial candidate Alexi Giannoulias. It seems that, when it comes to citizen journalism, liberals can dish it out, but they can’t take it, and in considering just why they are apparently so touchy with respect to this particular manifestation of “new” media, we need to look at the a bigger picture, one which goes beyond the significance of the stories broken, or the merits or otherwise of the tactics employed; what is really remarkable is that conservative “citizen journalists” exist at all, and that they are reaching an increasingly wide audience with their exposure of the antics of liberal activists and Democrat politicians. You see, it was not supposed to be like this.
Strange as it may seem to conservatives who decry the liberal bias of the mainstream media, there are many on the left who shriek with ironic laughter at such concerns. To Marxist-inspired journalism professors and their acolytes, steeped in postmodern deconstructionism and “critical studies” theory, the media are little more than corporate tools of a neo-liberal capitalist system, inducing a state of false consciousness in the hapless plebes with rosy coverage of economic matters, cheer-leading western nations to war against peoples with darker-colored skin, and sedating the potentially restless masses with feel-good stories of puppies saved from frozen lakes and banal coverage of celebrity lifestyles; all the while distracting us from our true brotherhood with our fellow workers of the world with racist coverage of foreigners and minorities, and keeping us in the thrall of the national security state with hyped-up reports of non-existent terrorist threats. Reagan-era deregulation is blamed for the rise of media conglomerates cynically focused on the commercial bottom line, for whom real investigative reporting – which in any case media owners would be reluctant to deploy against government interests and big business – is sacrificed as a costly indulgence. And yes, incredibly, although Fox News is routinely trotted out as the most egregious offender, this analysis is applied to the American media as a whole.
Mistrust of, and disdain for, “corporate” media was one of the main forces behind the rise of so-called civic, or public, journalism, the origins of which are generally traced back to the aftermath of the presidential election of 1988. A charitable, or self-serving, analysis traces the inspiration for the movement to critical self-evaluation on the part of some journalists’ with regard to their supposed mission to create an informed citizenry, after what many viewed as their superficial, “horse-race” coverage of the Bush-Dukakis race; in this reading, civic journalism represented a re-dedication to tackling more serious issues in a bid to remedy what was seen as society’s “communicative deficit.” A less generous assessment would agree that there was indeed much soul-searching amongst journalists after the election, but that it was prompted by less high-falutin’ concerns; after eight years of the hated Reagan, his anointed successor had just been elected in a sweeping victory. With no end in sight to the tendency of the electorate to vote against their own interests (as perceived by left), it was becoming clear to liberal journalists that they were not getting their message across by traditional means. Even before the election, 1988 had seen the most notable synthesis of the leftist critique of corporate news outlined above, Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” published to critical academic acclaim. And it is also worth noting that the Fairness Doctrine had finally been abolished in 1987, allowing the development of a genuinely free marketplace of ideas in which the left were clearly not confident they could thrive.
The idea of civic journalism grew in influence in the early 1990s; the fact that only the interference of Ross Perot allowed Bill Clinton to break the Republican stranglehold meant that there was no room for complacency. The movement’s sense of mission was reinvigorated by the failure of the Clinton healthcare reforms in 1993, which the left ascribed to a failure on the part of the media to properly explain the plan’s benefits, and the 1994 mid-term Republican victories. And the arrival on the scene of Fox News in 1996, coupled with the growing success of conservative talk radio, further underscored the fact that far-left ideas were not making sufficient inroads in what remained a center-right country. This, then, was the “communicative deficit”; since the existing capitalist system is so clearly structured against the interests of the masses, the only explanation for the continued compliance by those masses with the system was that they are not being correctly informed. This was essentially the same sort “false consciousness” argument that would later be advanced in Thomas Frank’s ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas?, although Frank was mainly concerned with how cultural conservatives were winning working-class votes with wedge issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
Although leftist media projects cloaked themselves in the language of participation – Democracy Now, established in 1996, calls itself a, “community media collaboration” – the civic journalism movement, while encouraging more engagement with and involvement by audiences, was still essentially hierarchical, led as it was by professional journalists. This did not go far enough for far-left activists, who seized the baton of citizen journalism in 1999 during the so-called “Battle of Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization meeting, where an organization calling itself Independent Media Centers was born. On its website, “Indymedia,” as it has come to be known, states that it is “…a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media’s distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity.” While the self-styled “radical” journalists of Indymedia may have been independent of the “corporate media ,” they were certainly not independent of the anti-globalization movement – a loose confederation of anarchists, environmental protesters and organized labor, which provided much of the muscle backing up the anarchist shock troops in Seattle. Indymedia describe their journalism as “grassroots” and “democratic,” and these, along with other far-left euphemisms such as “community,” “street,” “participatory,” and “public” are used interchangeably by academics discussing citizen journalism in its various manifestations.
Although citizen journalism in the form of the Drudge Report was credited with playing a role in the exposure of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Bush years saw the realization of the potential of “oppositional” journalism. A breakthrough for the genre was Trent Lott’s 2002 paean to Strom Thurmond, which was overlooked by the mainstream media until left-wing bloggers fanned the flames, a vindication to the far-left of their view that the mainstream media simply did not advance radical interests – a concern fueled by events after 9/11, when the media was viewed as not critical enough of the Global War On Terror abroad and what the left saw as the shredding of the constitution and the establishment of a police state at home. But almost immediately the left found that citizen journalism’s pen could be double-nibbed, as conservative bloggers exposed the faked Bush National Guard memos that would bring down Dan Rather. At the same time, with the mainstream media being as oppositional to the Bush “regime” as any radical journalists could hope to be, citizen journalism on the left failed to make noticeable headway outside of blogs preaching to the converted. And while “Rathergate” should have been a shot across the bows of the left, apparently no one thought to ask; whither citizen journalism under an administration with a left-wing agenda? We are seeing the answer today, as Lawrence O’Keefe and other conservatives take their turn to “speak truth to power.”
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