... why do we need anyone to tell us what’s important? We decide that. What’s important to you isn’t important to me. Why must we all share the same importance? Because we all shared the same newspaper. There is the wellspring of the myth: the press.
Recently, I saw a bit of the PBS Newshour where a bunch of journalists were sitting around oohing and ahhing over what was going on in Iran after that country's recent election, what with all the twittering and blogging and transmitting of photos and videos via cell phones, etc. And I wondered what planet these people had been living on these past few years. Maybe they should read An Army of Davids.
That description of the Times news meeting isn't only unselfconsciously narcissistic. It's also unintentional satire.
Unfortunately, however self-important mainstream journalism and the big media establishment has become, in the US it is still by far the most effective, efficient and far-reaching way to reach a lot of people in a minimum amount of time. So the decisions and obsessions of its workers matter. (As an example: while the author of An Army of Davids has a blog that clearly is a good example of the new, individual-empowered media, from what I can tell the book itself was published by an established publishing house, which gave it a leg up on getting newspaper reviews, space at booksellers - all the ways that books get noticed and discussed in the broad public square -- though I suppose the blog helped move that publishing contract along.) The internet is a wonderful place, but it is also very, very crowded and noisy. A idea may be great in the abstract, but if only twenty people know of it, its usefulness is limited. One must hope one pundit desperate for talking points will stumble across it and then blather about it on CNN.
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