Real news and the infrastructure required to assemble and distribute it, is the product of a bygone era. It has become tangential to a society that increasingly communicates in little word bursts of whatever pops into somebody’s head at a given moment. Our collective focus on the individual has made viewpoint and opinion far more valuable than fact and research. It would appear that the factual has become secondary to reactive expression… and reaction is what has come to rule the online sphere. The larger implication of this massive intellectual shift, while significant, has also been marginalized because, except for an ever-shrinking sliver of the adult demographic, virtually no one cares. Facts, analysis and verified information has ceased to be a factor in how we create, consume and differentiate the information we’re bombarded with in the modern age.
As you might have guessed, the main theme of director Andrew Rossi’s Page One: Inside the New York Times is the struggle The Times is having in the age of the Internet. Unfortunately, instead on analyzing why a newspaper giant like The Times has become largely irrelevant to a vast cross-section of its former demographic, Rossi chooses to march a bunch of people past the camera, each one telling us how awful it would be if The Times did not survive. Page One distills the argument for why the New York Times should remain an important and necessary institution down to a feeble and flimsy excuse for an answer…. because we told you so. There’s something inadvertently fascinating about this response. It serves to amplify the arrogance of the proponents of traditional media and ignore a much more profound question that the declining fortunes (and readership) of the New York Times is representative of. How, and perhaps even more importantly, why has news consumption changed so drastically in such a short period of time?
At the risk of editorializing here a little bit myself, I think a far more interesting documentary could have been teased from this line in inquiry. There are countless factors that potentially play into the collapse of traditional media outlets, but you could likely divide them into two distinct categories. Firstly, you could argue that the Fourth Estate (the press) has been traditionally charged with holding the other estates to account. It could be said that they have failed society in that responsibility in recent decades. Numerous, interconnected examples could be trotted out – the divisive, partisan politics of news organizations such as Rupert Murdoch’s empire, the fallibility of institutionalized media conglomerates in reporting on issues as varied as the financial meltdown, the corruption of the political process, war, globalism, wealth distribution, the environment, etc. In a nutshell, you could argue that, somewhere along the line, the press lost the trust of it readership.
A second factor might be brought under the microscope as well and it’s one that’s playing out in all sorts of arenas these days; the collapse of reason in an age of intellectual laziness. You could look at how formal education has veered away from the structured teaching methodologies of the past and toward broad, self-directed, interest-based learning and how expertise is valued less and less in that environment. It could be noted that specialists are increasingly seen as unnecessary filters wedged between knowledge and student, that wisdom and experience have been replaced by free thought and interpretation. You could posit that a society that chooses to explicitly ignore expertise and instead rely on generalist opinion forming common knowledge, results in the population being less inclined to seek out information from traditional sources. These points could then be summarized to suggest that knowledge isn’t as much gained these days, as copied and circulated between peers, regardless of whether it’s been independently validated or not.
Which brings us full circle back to the Page One: Inside the New York Times. Its title ends up being the source of its greatest limitation. Had it been called Page One: Outside the New York Times, perhaps it could have supplied the viewer with something of value, something beyond the smug indifference of ”because we told you so”. Had the filmmakers reversed their line of inquiry and asked questions about what was going on outside Renzo Piano’s magnificent Times headquarters, perhaps something truly informative might have sprung from this documentary. As it stands, the shifting media landscape, and the reason people are opting to obtain their news elsewhere, is almost validated by the bunker mentality and insular world represented here.
Page One: Inside the New York Times
As you might have guessed, the main theme of director Andrew Rossi’s Page One: Inside the New York Times is the struggle The Times is having in the age of the Internet. Unfortunately, instead on analyzing why a newspaper giant like The Times has become largely irrelevant to a vast cross-section of its former demographic, Rossi chooses to march a bunch of people past the camera, each one telling us how awful it would be if The Times did not survive. Page One distills the argument for why the New York Times should remain an important and necessary institution down to a feeble and flimsy excuse for an answer…. because we told you so. There’s something inadvertently fascinating about this response. It serves to amplify the arrogance of the proponents of traditional media and ignore a much more profound question that the declining fortunes (and readership) of the New York Times is representative of. How, and perhaps even more importantly, why has news consumption changed so drastically in such a short period of time?
At the risk of editorializing here a little bit myself, I think a far more interesting documentary could have been teased from this line in inquiry. There are countless factors that potentially play into the collapse of traditional media outlets, but you could likely divide them into two distinct categories. Firstly, you could argue that the Fourth Estate (the press) has been traditionally charged with holding the other estates to account. It could be said that they have failed society in that responsibility in recent decades. Numerous, interconnected examples could be trotted out – the divisive, partisan politics of news organizations such as Rupert Murdoch’s empire, the fallibility of institutionalized media conglomerates in reporting on issues as varied as the financial meltdown, the corruption of the political process, war, globalism, wealth distribution, the environment, etc. In a nutshell, you could argue that, somewhere along the line, the press lost the trust of it readership.
A second factor might be brought under the microscope as well and it’s one that’s playing out in all sorts of arenas these days; the collapse of reason in an age of intellectual laziness. You could look at how formal education has veered away from the structured teaching methodologies of the past and toward broad, self-directed, interest-based learning and how expertise is valued less and less in that environment. It could be noted that specialists are increasingly seen as unnecessary filters wedged between knowledge and student, that wisdom and experience have been replaced by free thought and interpretation. You could posit that a society that chooses to explicitly ignore expertise and instead rely on generalist opinion forming common knowledge, results in the population being less inclined to seek out information from traditional sources. These points could then be summarized to suggest that knowledge isn’t as much gained these days, as copied and circulated between peers, regardless of whether it’s been independently validated or not.
Which brings us full circle back to the Page One: Inside the New York Times. Its title ends up being the source of its greatest limitation. Had it been called Page One: Outside the New York Times, perhaps it could have supplied the viewer with something of value, something beyond the smug indifference of ”because we told you so”. Had the filmmakers reversed their line of inquiry and asked questions about what was going on outside Renzo Piano’s magnificent Times headquarters, perhaps something truly informative might have sprung from this documentary. As it stands, the shifting media landscape, and the reason people are opting to obtain their news elsewhere, is almost validated by the bunker mentality and insular world represented here.
La Sporgenza
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at 11:49 pm