SITTING with some friends recently, a discussion about an article by The New York Times’ columnist Nicholas D. Kristof nearly caused me to leave the room in a huff. I was arguing from my position as someone who works in the newspaper industry. My friends, a theatre person and a PhD student, were taking the line of media consumers.

People are increasingly turning to the Internet for their daily dose of news, especially in the US and especially as more and more newspapers fold. “When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about. Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves,” observed Kristof. “That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.”

In support of his argument, he quoted various research works. One of them was a study in which mails were sent out to Republicans and Democrats, offering them political research from a neutral source. The study found that both groups were most eager to receive intelligent arguments that backed up their pre-existing views. Some interest was also shown in receiving obviously silly arguments for the other party’s views, since “we feel good when we can caricature the other party as dunces,” wrote Kristof. “There was little interest in encountering solid arguments that might undermine one’s own position.”

Certainly, people like to read material and meet people who present views they agree with, I argued, quoting Kristof as writing: “The effect of The Daily Me would be to insulate us further in our own hermetically sealed political chambers. […] One 12-nation study found Americans the least likely to discuss politics with people of different views, and this was particularly true of the well-educated. High school dropouts had the most diverse of discussion-mates, while college graduates managed to shelter themselves from uncomfortable perspectives. The result is polarisation and intolerance.”

My friends disagreed, however. Their view was that people interested in debate and the expansion of their minds and horizons will in any case make the effort to learn about opposing or alternative views. And, they argued, the Internet makes it much, much easier to read perspectives of news from all sorts of angles since the whole world is – literally – at your fingertips. Those who are narrow-minded or rigid in their views, those who are only looking for the confirmation of their pre-existing beliefs will, even in the traditional news media, only hear what they want to hear.

I, however, could not have what I perceived as the seminal importance of my profession sidelined in this manner. There is all sorts of rot on the net, I argued, and people consider as ‘news’ everything from conspiracy theories about Israel orchestrating the 9/11 attacks to bloggers styling themselves as analysts and reporters. I resorted to Kristof once again: “The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected ‘news’ acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays.”

The danger in the concept of ‘citizen journalist’, I argued, is that there is no quality control or credibility. What goes into the traditional news media is selected and filtered by industry professionals who have the experience and the knowledge to separate the grain from the chaff, and who make the effort to include oppositional points of view. If everyone elevated themselves to this position of power, the results would be certain viewpoints propagating themselves over and over again, with people becoming ever more firmly entrenched in their views. Or, alternatively, the ‘news’ would become such a cacophony of clashing views that nothing solid would emerge from that din.

During this discussion, at least, this statement proved my undoing. The central issue in the so-called democratisation of the news is the power to inform and therefore influence. In the traditional style of journalism, this power was available to a select few: those who worked in the profession and had access to and the means to report on the news. Partly, this was a result of the forms the news took: print and even television, for the technical nature and expense of the process of producing a newspaper or putting information on-air was such that amateurs were excluded. So journalists selected the news or decided upon the importance/relevance of events or analysis. The field was regulated from the inside. And on the whole, the system worked, producing certain newspapers or channels that gathered a reputation for credibility and fairness, while others were clearly labelled as the yellow journalism sort.

Nevertheless, as I have argued on these pages on earlier occasions, a process of filtration through selection has always and inevitably been at play. Journalists can, with good reason, be accused of operating within a closed loop that is not always in tune with the concerns of the readers. It is, of course, impossible to empirically prove how far audiences are influenced by consuming what others have designated as news, or how far journalists pick up on matters of public interest or concern. Both streams are at play but it cannot be established what the percentages are.

So, it can be argued, the democratisation of the news through the Internet is actually a good thing since it allows non-insiders the power to not only submit their concerns but also access the points of view in which they are interested. In future decades, perhaps the ‘regulation from within’ effect will display itself at work in this area as well. Some blog spots or independent analysts will gather credibility, others will fall by the wayside for lack of interest in their manifestly silly or biased views.

Perhaps. I fear greatly, though, that the turn of events written of by Kristof may come to pass. Most people do like to have their views reiterated, as is demonstrable in our choice of everything from friends to favourite news channel. Hopefully, there are also a fair few who can “struggle on our own to work out intellectually with sparring partners whose views we deplore.”

—hmumtaz@dawn.com