Deliberating on Democracy (2 of 2)
by Tony Chavira
Is his book The Power of News, Michael Schudson states that, “Everyone in a democracy is a certified critic, which is as it should be.” All information is potentially a “form of culture,” an inherent philosophy of principles that individuals in society can use to understand it. Online publications like ours are potentially a form of journalism that fills a gap between insufficient, lacking and non-investigative news reporting at all scales. Sure, “traditional journalism” as a philosophical model is ideal in a commentary website’s inception: all the necessary information is backed up with relevant links, follow-though, topic-relevancy, and detailed and thorough investigation. But overall, online journalism as a practice has the same problems with bias, legitimacy, celebrity and dynasty as traditional news outlets (only without the FCC or any other governmental regulation to stop libel, slander or just plain lying). What’s a commentary site like FourStory to do?
Really, how exactly do online writers take into consideration their roles and responsibilities to the greater public? Any editorial restrictions are inherently self-imposed, self-detailed, and self-initiated. When you really get down to it, you just have to trust that the writers are looking out for you, your community and your way of life. You have to trust that we’re delivering information that you’ll find interesting, that you’ll care to know and that you can use to either incite change or protect yourself. You have to believe—deep down inside—that the rational, critical debate that arises from online information outlets will in fact affect people and their communities.
Ideally, I’d like to think about the Internet as a “public sphere,” a traditional model for coming together and approaching topics with clear-headed rationality originally developed by the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. A “public sphere,” for our purposes, is a safe environment where private citizens can join together to form a public to deliberate on common interests, one essentially open to anyone with the intention of passing the discussion onto those who influence policy. The ability of millions of individuals to log onto the Internet at once to share and distribute ideas and information may idyllically provide a great way to perpetuate democratic discourse. The simple fact that information is so readily available online is testament to the process of political involvement, but we know that there’s no way we can keep the conversations truly “rational.” You just can’t get rid of Internet trolls.
But the fact that we are able and willing to create communities online (as well as receive and respond to comments on our articles) is an even stronger argument that the Internet’s still a great place for democratic deliberation. Maybe clearheaded, nonpartisan rationality just isn’t a real possibility. We need to be able to retain individuality and participate in the political discourse at the same time. Maybe we have an edge in this respect.
So it is possible that journalism operates under the assumption of false rationality? Who said that democracy was required to be rational? In practice, our democracy is ridiculously self-centered, and it is only natural that our news, as a reflection of that democracy, is also. People don’t need to somehow reject their opinions and points-of-view in order to become more objective, or overly generalize their political views to become involved in the political process. But does this mean that there’s no hope for rational discussion anywhere online? Is everything we’re trying to achieve on FourStory (or anywhere online for that matter) so biased that it isn’t worth its e-weight? Worse yet, does this mean that potentially all information is inherently subjective?
Jurgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) states that this infusion of private topics and interest in the public sphere actually leads to its depoliticizing—where a forum meant to discuss important topics becomes overtaken by individual issues. The more interest-based voices added to the public sphere, the less the sphere becomes about political change and the more it becomes about Michael Jackson’s death or Mark Sanford’s mistress. Whether or not this is a bad thing is not for us to judge, but where does this leave FourStory and others who want to advocate for real social justice, when all media can be seen as disingenuous “infotainment?”
In this respect, the most important aspect of what we’re trying to do at FourStory is advocate for change at every possible turn. It maybe be that not all audiences enjoy the straightforwardness of a rational public sphere debate, and that’s fine. It’s just as likely that some readers cannot relate to dry information. Both work for us, and ultimately it doesn’t help our cause if you leave FourStory with no boiling pit of social justice rage raging within you. This is, at its core, an argument for which form of information dispersal is the best, but common sense tells us that people don’t take in information the same way. If diversifying your methods of information dispersal is the best way to enhance overall democratic deliberation, so be it. As Donna Schoenkopf said in her latest article, we “are convinced that [we] are right.”
Discussing both the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of journalism has everything to do with the righteousness of journalism as a standard of information reporting, so reflecting on it every once in a while is sort of a necessity. Being an online publication, we set the internal bar for ethics and practice extremely high, as it only helps our mission to keep the quality of information high. Besides, we know that the romantic theories of journalism can be very readily and easily put into practice on the Internet by groups like us: blogger journalists can provide evenhanded information, and this information can incite deliberation. Blogging is a true form of democratic journalism in its natural ability to provide wide and expansive amounts of information while retaining the interest of readers through directness. In some ways we at FourStory are more accountable to the public than any type of mainstream writer, especially since our readers are what help to maintain both the spirit of our analyses and the consistency of our deliberations.
Although the degree to which FourStory can incite deliberation has yet to be tested, websites that are true to their form retain legitimacy through evenhanded references and linking, structuring their arguments not only to convince their audience but to allow their readers to remain free-thinking and come to their own conclusions. The point of online journalism, as we approach it at FourStory, is to present our opinions and information in a way that contributes to the ideal of democracy. We attempt to contribute information in a way that allows for you to critique us, mainstream media, politicians, and the political system itself, by coming to your own conclusions and making up your own mind.
I just hope that, even within the confines of the Internet, we have found a key audience of readers interested in democratic deliberation that’s literally unrestricted and unregulated ... trolls and all.
www.racaia.com | tony@fourstory.org
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