Ben Buckman.net

Thomas Friedman was recently asked how the NY Times can be trusted after reporting so wrongly on Iraq for so long. He started with a sensible answer and then told the questioner fuck you for asking.

David Weinberger explains the situation:

Friedman's right that compared to most blogs and other newspapers, the Times is quite trustworthy. But the fact that it misreported on Iraq for a year, in a way that consistently tended towards the Bush administration's misguided policies, taught a definitive lesson we would be fools not to learn.

It's not just a lesson about the New York Times. The Times is best of breed. Nor is this is about the integrity or professionalism of reporters, journalists, and thrice-Pulitzered columnists. Rather, it's about the most basic structure of the news and the most basic value the news media have promised us:

The news is divided into stories. That reflects our instinct to understand through narratives, but the constrained nature of traditional media — paper, broadcast media — requires snipping news stories out of the cloth in which they're embedded. Hyperlinks enable a closer approximation to the way events are nothing but folds in an uncuttable fabric.

Stories compose "the news" as if there were any "the"-ness about, as if it were a country that could be explored or colonized, as if a restaurant insisted that its menu was all the food we need ever eat.

Much of the value promised by the papers and broadcast news shows is that they give us comprehensive global coverage of The News. Read the morning paper and you've read The News. Give us 8 minutes and we'll give you the world. Hahaha.

Traditionally, the news is published. It comes out at some moment and then the cycle starts again. The world, on the other hand, is in continuous rotation.

The news is reported in a calm, neutral, objective voice. That voice increasingly seems like it's hiding something.

All of these changes reflect the move from media that handle the problem of scale — the amount to communicate so far outstrips the capacities of the medium — by putting things in neat rectangles. When the news is published on paper or according to the rectangles of a broadcast schedule, the news looked like a set of side by side stories. Now that the medium is a network, the news is starting to look much more like a network itself, linked as inextricably as are the events and the cultures that produce them. 

The news is a network. And not a broadcast network. An actual, Internetty, bottom-up, wazoo-linked, easier-to-include-than-exclude network. 

Newspapers as august as the NY Times are not such networks. They are bounded objects. Bounded objects often don't do very well in the ecology of networks. I only hope that we can find a way to sustain the network of talented, dedicated people and processes that currently produce the bound boxes full of day-old stories.

If not, we will be hearing a lot more F-bombs from Tom Friedman.

(h/t: Jay Rosen)