Eric Alterman has a detailed assessment of the tie that binds newspapers and blogs in this week’s New Yorker. The Nation-blogger, prof and journo, known for his books on the media, democracy, and Bruce Springsteen, takes us back to the 1920’s, the great days of Walter Lippman and John Dewey’s battle over how engaged the public really can be in democracy. As Alterman writes, “Lippman identified a fundamental gap between what we naturally expect from democracy and what we know to be true about people.” He called the average American a “deaf spectator in the back row” and essentially said that politics and society was, for the most part, too complex for the plain folk and that the newspapers that dared wade into its nuance would never get it right. We’re only good at reporting “the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch.”
Touche.