The Banana Peel Project

I just found out about Eric Alterman’s fairly recent article in The New Yorker, “Out of print: The death and life of the American newspaper” (March 31, 2008), in which Alterman expertly lays out the centuries-long debate over the value of “objective” journalism for American democracy.

It’s a great article, and a fantastically clear explication of the debate between Walter Lippmann (the bitter and pessimistic “elitist pundit”) and John Dewey (the warm and fuzzy communitarian small-”d” democrat). The bit at the end about Anderson’s imagined communities is also deeply interesting. It’s amazing how much clearer these theoretical positions get when put in a contemporary, material context.

It’s interesting that for all of the great scholarship contained within it, it’s still deeply committed to the idea that “good” journalism is “objective” journalism. Throughout, objectivity remains an “unattainable ideal” that may not be reachable even through Dewey’s deliberative communities. There seems to be more than a little fear that blogging, the partisan press, and independent media outfits will never be able to bolster the democratic process.

That said, there’s an interesting comment–almost a side note–at the end where Alterman points to Europe as an example of a place where local, community-based, politically biased news has coincided with political participation that “dwarfs” that of the US. A bit of wistful longing for the European dream, maybe? I don’t think so. If “objectivity” is part of the (uniquely) American democratic ideal (it is), and if Lippmann really did call for some kind of “elitist” informational dictatorship (he did), maybe Alterman is really wondering what happened to the “good ol’ days” when journalists and the corporate behemoths that owned them at least tried to speak the truth.

In any case, it’s a great and well thought-out article that lays out the debates clearly and in human terms. It’s also neat that it appeared in The New Yorker–a clever, pretentious, boisterously elitist magazine for pipe-smoking denizens of East Egg that apparently harbors no illusions about its own explicitly political journalism.