Opinion The new churnalism
If TV news proves inaccurate,it is supplanted but not corrected. In the churn,nothing has much weight
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A colleague from a TV news network was telling me the other day that its informal slogan was now Never wrong for long. News goes on air as it emerges in a furious competitive scramble,and then if it proves inaccurate it is supplanted rather than corrected. That,I guess,is what is meant by the new churnalism. So intense is the churn that nothing has much weight. Accuracy sometimes seems a quaint journalistic concept. As for truth,it belongs to a distinct moral universe.
On the 11th anniversary of 9/11 the Middle East has erupted,driven by a meme one of those notions that spreads across the new media ecosystem at lightning speed once a spark has been provided,in this case a pitiful porn-like trailer for a movie in which the Prophet Mohammed appears as a highly sexed buffoon. The movie was initially attributed to a Jew who proved not to exist although he had given interviews to The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal. It was later found to be the work of right-wing Christians in California,one a convicted felon. They were aided by a member of the Coptic diaspora in Washington who managed to propel a clip onto a popular Salafist TV station in Cairo,setting off riots across the Islamic world that drove up the clicks for the trailer on YouTube. Suddenly Innocence of Muslims was trending.
The whole thing sounds like a bad churnalistic joke. But of course people are dead and the least funny aspect is this really is the world we live in. In a hyperconnected world possibilities increase for a minority of extremists to manipulate the moderate middle: Look at what a handful of idiots in California helped ignite.
But memes dont just happen through curious symbiosis. As Evgeny Morozov,the author of The Net Delusion,told me,Its not necessarily true that memes are born rather than made. In this case,a ferociously anti-Islamic Copt named Morris Sadek laboured hard to interest an Egyptian journalist in the movie; only then did the infernal cascade begin.
New media often need the help of mainstream media before viral critical mass is achieved. Once it is,the algorithms kick in. Outfits like YouTube are agnostic intermediaries. They want,as Morozov put it,more clicks,more traffic,more knowledge about viewers and so more advertising.
The White House is on the defensive; it even requested at one point that Google,the parent of YouTube,consider removing the movie an ill-considered request wisely resisted. Free speech is meaningless if it does not extend even to views that are loathsome.
In fact the violence does not change the critical evolution underway in the Arab world,one that needed more support from Obama,not less. Mohamed Morsi,the Egyptian president,was slow to react to violence. But it is far better to have his Muslim Brotherhood grappling with Islamic extremists than an isolated US-backed dictator; and the debate now raging from Cairo to Tunis a debate that would have been impossible before the Arab Spring is a necessary part of the slow evolution of societies from terrorist-breeding passivity to citizen-breeding agency.
This change is generational. The folly of this September may be viewed one day as part of the evolution of the Brotherhood towards the conservative pragmatism that has served Recep Tayyip Erdogans Justice and Development well in Turkey. That,I know,is an optimistic scenario. Memes have their own destructive energy.
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