Evan Maxwell on journos and blogs

The older I get, and the further I get away from the newsroom, the more I believe that much of the 20th century journalistic emphasis on objectivity was not well-placed. It came, I think, from the effort by newspaper owners (and their minions, the editors) to make their product appeal to as broad a segment of the population as possible. More readers, more profits. To get more readers, you have to emasculate the product, homogenize it, make it palatable by seeming to centrifuge all opinion (read controversial or upsetting opinion) out of it. The result was a kind of pablum that seems high-minded and worthy but is, in actuality, a scam, a sham or a quasi-religion.

The antipathy for blogging is another reflection of that. Journalism wants to scrub out of its practitioners all appearances of individual opinion, much like the army scrubs idiosyncrasy out of new recruits. The soldiers who do the best job of internalizing these principles become officers (editors). The analogy could work about as well with the church.

But the process goes against both human nature and a proper appreciation of human mental activity. We all have opinions, and the misguided effort to suppress them leads to hypocrisy and lots of other unhealthy things. The Web, with its ability to publish all kinds of opinion at the cost of a few electrons, is ultimately threatening to the institutions and corporations which rely on their monopoly of the means of publishing. I can put together a Web log and distribute it even more cheaply than the old broadsides used to be published and distributed. It is completely revolutionizing communication, and The Establishment is very, very uneasy with that revolution.

There, now. I feel better. Thanks for the trigger that set me off.

Evan Maxwell
Sedona, Ariz.