Internet Incest

The crisis isn't simply a matter of numbers, the shrinking ranks of foreign correspondents and the declining space accorded to foreign news. Of equal concern is the way that news is gathered and reported, the "how it's done" that leads to the "what we know "– and more, what we don't know.

For reporters 30 years ago, the China beat – or its equivalent in Latin America, Southeast Asia or Africa – was an all-encompassing, all-consuming reality. Lost in the mysterious intricacies of another land and culture, cut off from all that was familiar, we stumbled haphazardly toward our own, independent conclusions. "Home" was the distant void where our stories were telexed.

Today, many chroniclers of the foreign scene "travel" without ever leaving home, literally as armchair blogsters or figuratively as hyper-connected correspondents glued to their cellphones and laptops. In either case, the source data, the substitute for raw experience, comes mostly from the same place, the virtual universe of the Internet.

The results are also nearly the same: journalists who picture the rest of the world from within the confines of their own frame of reference, a frame that is often more vividly present, thanks to 21st century communications, than the physical landscape beyond their hotel room door and the smells and sounds in its streets.

The powerful tug of the familiar isn't new; it reflects a natural human impulse, summed up in the adage that "all journalism is a form of autobiography." What is new, however, is the ability to move about in the larger world without severing those autobiographical constraints or stretching them.

Indeed, the Internet has given birth to a kind of collective media autobiography – I don't know what else to call it – as reporters everywhere are trained in the same technologal environment, employ the same self-referential research tools, and consult each other's work online before committing their thoughts to virtual paper.

Reporting, in its Internet guise, is incestuous. The entire transaction is conducted within the same family of interests, facts and preconceptions.

Take a spin through Google News, which is now the chief provider of information for millions. The articles featured on its site are selected by a robot editorial program that trolls the web, picking out the most frequently repeated stories and angles – the concerns that already monopolize our attention.

The appearance is a vast expansion of the media gene pool, with Google's robot editor directing us to hundreds of articles on a single major event, extracted from newspapers and magazines on every continent. But the reality, on closer inspection, is incest.

The vast majority of those stories are clones of each other, with mind-numbingly scant differences in the range or content of what's reported in Beijing or Moscow, Buenos Aires or Chicago, Bamako or Riyadh. The scope of our potential interests is trimmed down to the barest of common denominators: what we already know, and more alarmingly, what we already think about it, endlessly repeated.

Reporters, no less than their readers, are faithful disciples of this system, even as its free supply of information whittles away the circulation of their newspapers – and with it the money that finances their own budgets. They learn, if they want to survive, that the articles meeting the robot's approval are invariably brief, shorn of independent analysis and skimpy on background.

As far back as the 1950s, the Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan argued that each new generation of technology imposes its own inherent limitations and possibilities on the content of news. "The medium," he insisted in his most celebrated observation, "is the message." Although he died in 1980, before the triumph of the Internet , McLuhan would surely have noted that speed, brevity and the short attention span are its defining hallmarks.

One consequence is that the story as story – a narrative, in which reporters aspired to put their readers at the center of an event, to confront them firsthand with its terrible complexities – is in danger of vanishing, overwhelmed by a tidal wave of short takes and oversimplification.

The jury is still out on the longterm prospect. The Internet has been a significant part of our lives for for less than 15 years, and the final verdict on what it will mean for news, for a deeper understanding of the world, has not yet been rendered. But at the moment, the outlook is profoundly troubling.

Coming: PART TWO: HOW WE READ

This column originally appeared on cbs5.com (http://cbs5.com/worldview)
Republished by permission.