The New York Times Versus The Future

BY MATTHEW LYSIAK
Serf City
Volume 2 Issue 3

What is most intriguing about the New York Times outing of top-secret programs aimed at tracking terrorists isn’t their well-documented contempt of the Bush Administration, but rather the increasing naivety by which they believe their transgressions will be accepted by the public and more importantly their failure to come to terms with the new age of media.

What is new isn’t the New York Times publication of articles against the best interest of America at a time of war, rather the information environment in which the Times now exists.

Americans have long endured a press monopoly centered around a handful of powerful newspapers and television networks. Less choices helped serve as an enabler for a system where journalists not only accepted the role of dispensing the events of the day, but also filtering, editorializing, and being the self-anointed guardians of information.

This has served the public for both good, like in the case of Edward R. Murrow’s exposure of Joseph McCarthy’s zealotry, and for bad, as in the New York Time’s Walter Duranty’s 13 articles written in 1931 that concealed the deaths of as many as 10 million Ukrainians. The only constant being that the message was always controlled and the messenger rarely challenged.

The first fired-shot of the press revolution can be traced back to January 17th, 1998, the day when the computer geek with the funny hat, Matt Drudge, broke a story about a President and an intern. The Drudge Report would proceed to set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to the impeachment and censure of a sitting President, but even more importantly, it was the day when the mainstream press lost their control of how the information was filtered to the public.

Many have since forgotten that the story was actually developed not by Drudge, rather by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, but the decision came down from executives to spike the story. "It's the classic journalistic dilemma," Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas had said a year later while referring to whether or not the public should know about an obstruction of justice charge against a sitting president. "There is information about the case we didn't even release until this week, almost a year later."

As it turned out, releasing the information to the public was no longer at Mr. Thomas’s sole discretion. The marketplace of ideas had moved forward without his approval and the public was given the right to integrate the new information about the Chief Executive the way it saw fit.

A more recent example could be seen in Dan Rather’s attempt to alter the outcome of a Presidential election by running a false story built upon by false documents. Twenty years ago it could be assumed that the story would have run and only several years down the road, if ever, the public would have discovered what still remained of the truth. Today, the information was turned in a matter of hours as the documents hit the web for review by a countless number of amateur sleuths and discredited, along with Mr. Rather, only days after the “National Guard” report first aired.

We are part of an information renaissance without historical precedent. In the inevitable course of human evolution, technology has transcended the former barriers of time and space, what was once only available to the elites is now accessible to anyone with a computer or a satellite dish.

Without need for guardians or gatekeepers the public is looking towards the mainstream press to compete for the public’s attention by giving the consumer a better product. The Times, which has been suffering from a consistent loss in circulation, chose instead for the sensationalism of violating our nation’s national security.

New York Times Editor Bill Keller later issued a statement defending his decision to publish an article revealing classified programs used by America, even at the behest of government officials from both sides of the aisle, as a non-ideological issue of the public’s right to know.

Mr. Keller looks to be counting on the public sediment uncritically accepting his position. In another era it may have even been a reasonable assumption. Not in 2006.

Many in the old-press are going to have to get accustomed to the empowerment of the individual if they desire to remain relevant in today’s competitive information landscape of talk radio, cable news, and most importantly the internet. Those who adjust to it can thrive on the increased demand of a knowledge thirsty populace. Those who refuse to acknowledge the new paradigm can only sit on name recognition for so long before they themselves become antiquated relics of the past.

In today’s expanded free-market of ideas it is not the public that needs the Times. It is the Times that needs the public.