Blogger, journalist ‘schism’ is as old as America itself

Vin Crosbie points out that the schism between those who believe that future of news publishing belongs to ‘citizen journalists’ and those who believe readers will still prefer to have professionals investigating and reporting the news is as old as the American republic itself:

“Thomas Jefferson and his Democrat-Republican Party (which became the Democratic Party in 1836 and is unrelated to the current U.S. President’s Republican Party, which itself was founded in 1856) believed that the American people are capable of guiding themselves. By contrast, Alexander Hamilton and his Federalists Party believed that the People, however noble, are neither wise nor skilled enough to guide themselves and will need educated and professional help. This schism of political philosophies that has been raging in the America for more than 200 years. (One manifestation of it, established as a political compromise between the two philosophies, is the Legislative branch of the U.S. government: a House of Representatives whose members are directly elected by the People and a Senate whose members were, until 1913, wise men appointed by the states’ own legislatures and not by the people themselves.)”

And much as the U.S. established a way for both philosophies to coexist, there’s no reason professional journalists and bloggers can’t — and won’t — coexist in the future.

January 24, 2005 by
Filed Under: The Weblog Blog

COMMENTS

  • Donald Challenger

    The Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian “schism” may be a useful way of thinking broadly about American political thought, but it is a dubious analogy for thinking about journalism, as Ron Chernow?s recent and excellent bio of Hamilton makes clear.

    The fact is that Hamilton himself used and regarded newspapers as a public forum in which to debate the defining issues of the day. He wrote hundreds of pieces that we would today call advocacy journalism ? impassioned essays that, were they to appear on the screen instead of the page, would be indistinguishable from the rants of our best political blogs. The Federalist Papers, among others, were written on the fly against constant deadlines ? as many as six in a week ? in an effort to persuade ongoing and deeply divided state conventions to ratify the Constitution.

    Jefferson, though his rhetoric and ideals were certainly populist, had no interest in the real-life marketplace of ideas. Virtually all of his major writings first took the form of private letters to friends and political allies that could be vetted, discussed and edited before their eventual public dissemination ? sometimes years later.

    And while Hamilton loved to argue the nuts and bolts of policy, Jefferson was given to broad pronouncements long on poetic resonance but often short on rooted ideas. Another Hamilton biographer, Richard Brookhiser, calls them “floating incantations” and notes that when Timothy McVeigh was captured, he was wearing a T-shirt bearing a quotation from Jefferson. Not quite the stuff of citizen journalism.

    So whatever the relative merits of their political thought, Hamilton was the “blogger” willing to wade into the civic fray and trust to the power of his ideas and the judgment of the public. Jefferson was, to follow the analogy, more like an obsessively careful editor who sought absolute control over the debate.

    Or maybe the point is that such analogies simply do more harm than good. It?s a complicated world out there.

  • first_real_online_law_student@yahoo.com

    Blogs help(kstreetfriend’s comment). Without the opportunity to write about what is really taking place, readers will never discover important news….

    For example: According to the New York Times. Recently, a number of for-profit colleges have faced inquiries, lawsuits and other actions calling into question the way they inflate enrollment to mislead/increase the value of their parent company’s stock.

    In the last year, the Career Education Corporation of Hoffman Estates, Ill., has faced lawsuits, from shareholders and students, contending that, among other things, its colleges have inflated enrollment numbers. The company acknowledged that it was under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

    In February 2004, F.B.I. agents raided 10 campuses run by ITT Educational Services of Carmel, Ind., looking for similar problems.

    Kaplan is wholly own by the Washington Post Company. I provided the S.E.C., Department of Education, and federal courts information that appears to prove Kaplan inflated the Concord School of Law enrollment, telling investors that the “flagship” of its higher education division has as many as 600 to 1000 or more students.

    Why didn’t the Justice Department and S.E.C. included Kaplan with their investigation?

  • Colin from Bklyn

    I am always delighted to find someone invoking the history of media–I have a standard spiel about scholia and the obscene marginal doodlings of bored copyists being the medieval equivalent of blogging–and I enjoyed Donald’s reply, although I see no reason why blogging HAS to be identified with the pamphleteering, polemical spirit that made the broadsheets fly off the newsstands when printing presses got cheap enough so that a lot of people could own one. I’m happy to have bloggers try their hands at the work that we pros do: It might help them to appreciate the talent that some of us have–and the talent some of us think we have but lack–the same way that playing saxophone badly gives you a visceral sense of how great Bird and Coltrane were and how awful Kenny G really is. That’s a great way to build an appreciative readership for writing in a post-literate age. Blogging is a bit like punk rock, which made a virtue of putting the music out there before the band even learned to play their instruments. Even so, the great punk bands were the ones that WANTED to learn to play them, and eventually did–what Lou Reed called “growing up in public.” The poseurs were the one who just wanted to stick a safety pin through their nose and beat somebody over the head with a bass. I remember my favorite band back in the day used to get spit on for talking in worshipful tones on stage about that old dinosaur Jimmy Page–paragon of MSRR, mainstream rock ‘n’ roll, 50,000-watt FM radio. But the fact was, those guys had that respect for the old school that made them poets and musicians instead of wannabes. The Minutemen’s History Lesson Part 2, for example: “our band could be your life real names’d be proof me and mike watt played for years punk rock changed our lives we learned punk rock in hollywood drove up from pedro we were fucking corndogs we’d go drink and pogo mr. narrator this is bob dylan to me my story could be his songs i’m his soldier child our band is scientist rock but i was e. bloom, richard hell, joe strummer, and john doe me and mike watt, playing guitar.” We see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants. I don’t see that kind of respect from the blogging rabble that goes on about the MSM, though. They want to tear down Lippman, replace him with shabby demagoguery and hidden cameras on seminude desperate housewives, and market it as new and improved. Vulgus ex veritate pauca, ex opinione multa aestimat.