Mourn the man, not the moment

Walter Cronkite was amazing, and should be widely celebrated and eulogized. But NPR -- and not only NPR -- speaks longingly of a time when a benevolently paternalistic figure claimed the mantle of objectivity and was the sole necessary source of our news and information -- a time before all this "fragmentation" and "chaos."

I say, embrace the fragmentation and chaos.

I was in J-school when we stood at the cusp of transformation from conventional media to the new. A refugee from cognitive science, I argued loudly and at length for the impossibility of objectivity. The inevitable rejoinder was that we should "strive for it," and I never bought it. Better to explicitly wear your biases, I countered, than attempt to convince your audience you're delivering a service you'll never be able to provide. At best, the promise of objectivity is doomed to be empty and meaningless. At worst -- and it is more often at worst -- it's an insidious propaganda technique that hardens supposition into dogma and stalls progress on policy debate.

A funny thing happened since J-school. The natural alliance that should have existed between the moral relativists on the left (I don't truck with moral relativism, but I take my coalitions where I find them) and proudly partisan journalism never really materialized, aside from Michael Moore. Instead, we got the rise of Fox News and Limbaugh demagoguery, which, despite only the most half-hearted attempts at a claim of objectivity, are nevertheless eagerly joined in the pretense by an audience that appears to have an unquenchable thirst for an antidote to "fragmentation" and "chaos."

So perhaps I was wrong: not only does poor Mr. Cronkite get made into an emblem of something he didn't claim for himself, but so will mass audiences impose objectivity on sources patently not making any particular efforts to provide it. I had posited a top-down model of media and decided that the problem was that it provided too close a simulacrum to objectivity and confused the audience; I'd hypothesized that abandoning the attempt would mean extinguishing the demand. The problem is actually that we have a bottom-up model. Take away the attempt at objectivity, and an apparently inextinguishable groundswell of demand will award the contract to whomever's at hand.

I don't think the answer is to return to the Cronkite model, but I don't need to argue my case, because it isn't something that could ever happen. Barring technological calamity, the "major mouthpieces" moment is never coming back; the few remaining monolithic outlets (and I should know; I work for one) are swelling from internal pressure and are about to burst open into a merry Babel. The question is, how much dissonance can the demand for objectivity accept? I see us heading either toward a more sophisticated model of media consumption in which we automatically triangulate our truths -- and thus, incidentally, arriving at a much more complex, nuanced, and accurate picture than ever possible under the Cronkite "Great Man" narrative -- or towards rendering this movie into prophecy.

Putting aside my penchant for dramatic catastrophizing, I suppose I more realistically see both already occurring. The old digital divide is rapidly becoming a quaint snapshot of a moment in the broader history of the information age. But a new and more enduring one is upon us.