I used to love politics, and I guess I still do to some extent, though watching this year’s installment of the race for the White House has been excruciatingly painful in many regards. It’s not just the choice tomorrow, or the fact that it is, most likely, as important an election as I’ve ever been a part of. Plain and simple, it’s the fact that try as I might, I can’t point to a high-water mark in the campaign that makes me feel good about the process, that makes me look forward to the next one. And I don’t think that bodes well for tomorrow or the coming weeks, no matter who wins.
I think I’m even more disheartened by the media’s role in all of this, the frequency with which they have let just plain lies go unchallenged. And, of course, the partisanship. When I was at Ohio University getting my journalism degree many moons ago, I remember being struck by my professors’ fervor about the role of journalists as the Fourth Estate, the watchdog of government. The profession mattered, was revered, almost. There is so little of that left now. The idea that most Americans, if they get news at all, get it from the likes of Fox and CNN and MSNBC is pretty appalling. The media is now more a public relations arm of the parties than an arbiter of truth.
I have no clue what’s going to happen tomorrow, but I do have a prediction. Years from now when we look back at this election, I think we’ll see it as the one that really transitioned us to a very different place, both in the way we do politics and in the way we do media. Jay Rosen asks “Will the press even have this job in ’08?” I don’t think so. The world really is moving from “mass” media to “my” media, and I think much will change over the next four years. And I also think we might be on the cusp of some real reform of the process. I guess if there is one good thing that’s happened this year it’s that Howard Dean proved the people do have a voice, that there are ways we can participate and communicate without the filter. I know it eventually got suppressed by the parties and the media, but it was a heckuva start, and it’s only going to grow.
Maybe Lawrence Lessig will be right:
Technology has facilitated a creativity that will fundamentally alter the democratic potential of a wide variety of people who cannot currently participate. It is changing the way culture gets made and remade, mixed and remixed. The culture is effecting the freedom to speak and the power to speak. It is a capacity to speak differently, a bottom up democracy. Not the New York Times democracy but a blog democracy. The potential to advance and spread in the sense of progress is enormous.
I hope so.
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