Good Morning Friends,

Just for a change of pace I thought I'd try laying out some reflections that I can deal with in one post each. By the way, I will be discussing in more detail, exteriorized tribalization/internalized self-tribalization in upcoming reflections on evolution.

Right now I'd like to say a word about the media. We all hear this: newspapers are in trouble. News services are slashing jobs. They are severely cutting back or closing their foreign bureaus. Readership is down, way down. Some editors are considering monetizing the content they put on the Internet.

Editors come on the radio and talk about the need to adapt to a richer, more dynamic media landscape. They pull out their hair in public. Heavens to Betsy! their business model is broken. Now I don't mean to sound unsympathetic...... Oh wait, yes I do.

Why are their readers, their subscribers, and indeed, advertizers abandoning them? After all, they do their best to be pluralistic, fair and balanced, even-handed, non-ideological, objective, and so forth. These editors wonder aloud, with a lump in their throats, what will become of our democratic republic without newspapers. They try to predict the future. What will the new media landscape look like twenty years from. Indeed, what role might the blogosphere play?

There are editors and reporters who caution us about seeing the Internet as the new promised land. Be wary of those bloggers and other free-wheeling Internet operators, those unschooled, untrained, unpolished cyber-ruffians. Even when they are on the radio one can imagine them wagging their finger in a schoolmarmish way.

The question before us is: what makes good media? I'm going to say the good news media is media, left, right, or center, which does sound structural work on the underlying issues involving particular stories. What does that mean? What do I mean by 'structural work?'

Let me address that with a negative example. One kind of media that I avoid is what I call obvious slam media. There is an Internet news service, who shall remain nameles, liberal Democrat in orientation. By the way, one mistake I think newspapers made was in denying their ideological perspective. It's striking how 'ideology' has become a dirty word. I believe that acknowleding up front an organization's ideological perspective, or bias, if you like, actually makes for more objective, if objectivity is necessarily something to strive for.

But anyway back to this nameless Internet news service of liberal Democrat orientation. There was a story in that cyberpaper about Chiness spying against the United States involving nuclear secrets of some kind, ranging over a period of time vaguely between 1980 and 2000 - vaguely. According to the story it seems that Republicans were blaming President Clinton. This story marshalled facts to show that it was actually Reagan's fault - so there!

Imagine two children on the playground saying "Did not!" "Did to!" "Did not!" "Did to" "Did not!" "Did to!" And on and on and on and on. This partisan sniping does not help the rest of us understand the underlying issue which is: what is the nature of international espionage? What is its legitimacy or lack thereof.

I suppose most nations have intelligence services that spy on their friends and enemies alike. America spies on other countries and other countries spy on us. Sometimes they're going to have their successes. No country can fully seal themselves off from such vulnerability. Any society that could and did probably wouldn't produce much worth stealing anyway (i think I read something like that somewhere).

We might also add that the basic mandate of intelligence services, at their most benign, is to break international law everyday, by suborning (is that the word?) treason. And its worth linking this to the CIA tortue scandal. How relevant is it for President Obama to order them to return to interrogation techniques limited to the army field manual? How relevant is trying to "fix" the CIA so that they go back to breaking the law, on a regular basis, just a little bit.

But this story in this cyberpaper had none of that. It was only concerned with scoring points against Republicans. So far, from what I've seen, all of their stories are like this. In short, maybe readership of newspapers are falling off is because people feel that the traditional purveyors of information about our world have gradually become less capable of explaining a world to us that, starting with 9/11, seems to be far, far more complex than we ever imagined and that the regular news organizations ever hinted at.

wingedcentaur.