I appreciate the irony of this post. And I hope you do too. If you do, it means that you've read Mark Bowden's latest article in The Atlantic describing the collapse of journalism or, if you prefer, the rise of what he calls post-journalism. The central feature of this emerging genre is not the search for the truth but the pursuit of victory. He writes:
I would describe [the] approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.
The irony, of course, is that Bowden classifies most bloggers as what's known in the trade as a thumbsucker, "a lazy columnist who rarely stirs from behind his desk, who for material just reacts to the items that cross it."
For me this is an important distinction. In most of my writing, I try to offer thoughtful observations from a common perspective in a way that adds something original to the discussion. I prefer to think of posts like this as serving a slightly different but also important role: raising your awareness of others who are trying to do the same.
