| T H E M E D I U M I S N' T T H E M E S S A G E |
Why the new media won't save the world — or even By David Futrelle
"Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age"
"A Reporter's Life"
By Walter Cronkite
"One Man's America: A Journalist's Search for the Heart of his Country" media criticism hasn't changed much since Spiro Agnew's 1970 denunciation of the "nattering nabobs of negativism," the effete media elites who look down their noses at the "silent majority." Oh, sure, there's a lot more media criticism today, professional and amateur. But whether the critic hails from the right, the left, or the center — or affects some postmodern political mishmash that won't even fit on the charts — the complaint is largely the same: that the media is out of touch, imposing its own, possibly pernicious, agenda on the rest of us. Noam Chomsky believes that the people hunger for news about East Timor The New York Times doesn't see fit to print; right-wingers believe the press is hiding the truth about Vince Foster. Over the past several years, a new breed of media critic has begun to emerge, one that sees the perfidy and obsolescence of the old media as the inevitable outcome of its old-fashioned ways and out-of-date technology. For salvation, these critics look to new communications technologies, especially the Internet. In the pages of Wired, hot-button novelist Michael Crichton announced the imminent death of the old-media "Mediasaurus," which he described as an obsolete institution that, like Detroit in the 1970s, seems intent on producing a "product of very poor quality" with "too much chrome and glitz." And in HotWired, journalist Josh Quittner announced the birth of the "way new journalism," in the process coining a term that became an instant cliché. These were but the opening salvos in what has become a barrage. In "Wired Style," a new media manifesto disguised as a style guide for way new editors, Wired's Constance Hale celebrates a new kind of writing that "jacks us in to the soul of a new society" — which sure sounds cool, whatever it might possibly mean. And Jon Katz, in both his "Media Rant" column on HotWired's Netizen site and in his new book "Virtuous Reality," has attempted to spell out in detail a new kind of journalism and a "new code of media ethics" for the interactive age. (Katz's book, it should be noted, is primarily an attack on moral-values bullies like William Bennett; his evangelizing for new media slips in the side door.) At first glance, these critics would seem to share little with one another, beyond their hatred of old media and their Wired connections. Crichton, for his part, is tired of all the "flashy chrome trim" one sees every night on the network news; he wants the facts, just the facts, and lots of them. Today, he argues, "the news of television and in newspapers is generally perceived as less accurate, less objective, less informed than it was a decade ago." Though he has a lot of them himself, Crichton doesn't want to have to hear the glib opinions of others. He wants raw data and "good information;" he wants a news service "in which all the facts [are] true, the quotes [aren't] piped, the statistics [are] presented by someone who knew something about statistics." Katz, by contrast, likes opinions — his own and those of others. Like most writers on the Web (including those in Salon), he is primarily a commentator, not a reporter. To Katz, media "objectivity" is part of the problem. Hale, in Wired Style, agrees. "We celebrate subjectivity," she writes. "As far as we're concerned, it's OK to have fun with facts." But Crichton and Katz have more in common than you might think: both prefer the raw to the cooked. They seek a journalism free of intermediaries, one that erodes the distinction between news "consumer" and news "producer." Crichton would like, essentially, to do his own reporting — to dig up facts and assemble his own interpretations from them. He wants to "remove [the] filters" between himself and the raw data of the news, freeing himself from such encumbrances as "Dan Rather, or the front page editor, or the reporter who pruned the facts in order to be lively and vivid." Katz, too, argues against too much filtering. What he wants is journalism as he imagines the founding fathers practiced it, back in the days when "there was almost no distinction between citizens and journalists," before editors and elite media stars set themselves up as "gatekeepers" for the news. In a series of developments that Katz argues have "shaken the old order down to its wingtips," new technologies have made possible a return to a truly democratic kind of journalism, based on the notion of almost unlimited interactivity. Katz finds the very notion exhilarating. "The idea that we can question and talk directly to one another, without relying on journalists as intermediaries," he writes, "transforms the notion of culture." All it takes is a computer and modem and a few rudimentary HTML skills: virtually anyone can compete directly with media giants like Time Magazine. "Now anybody with a VCR, cable box or computer is a miniature media tycoon, a little Bill Paley," Katz writes. "Millions of Americans are faxing, e-mailing and calling voice-mail boxes to sound off on every conceivable issue. Tens of thousands of idiosyncratic Web sites and home pages have sprung up on the ... Internet. This is more freedom of the press than journalists conceive of in their worst nightmares." Indeed, so convinced is Katz of the power of interactivity he refuses to write for publications that won't allow him to attach his e-mail address to his prose. For Katz, as well as for Hale, this opposition to filtering extends into the realm of style. For Hale, "rough-edged ... over-the-top" writing has much more appeal than well-burnished prose. Hale and Katz hope that the new journalism can draw upon the raw, frantic energy one finds in e-mail and Usenet postings, filled with prose bashed out without pause and without correction. The "new fractured language" said to emerge is "definitely not as elegant or polished as English used to be, but in a way, much more vital," Katz explains. In a section of "Wired Style" called, with typical neo-adolescent bravado, "Screw The Rules," Hale tells her readers that "[p]rovocative writing demands out-of-the-box thinking, a calculated willingness to break many of journalism's cardinal rules." And what exactly does this mean? Letting your writers explore the limits of their four-letter-word vocabulary. A refusal to edit away their grammatical errors. Hale likes the idea of "preserv[ing] every odd comma and random reference in a writer's stream of consciousness," demanding that editors, when faced with energetically lumpy prose, "resist filing it down, polishing it, editing it away." Katz, too, wages a kind of guerrilla war against editing, chastising The New York Times for having the gall to polish his writing and praising his editors at HotWired, who more or less let him be. 
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