Elitist Discourse

A piece by Brendan Nyhan, lamenting the increasingly partisan/ideological slant of the blogsphere and its effect on opinion journalism.

At a deeper level, these developments may offer a preview of the future of opinion journalism. Ex-reporters and political insiders currently dominate the nation's op-ed pages, but mainstream news organizations like the Washington Post are hiring a new generation of ideological bloggers who are likely to take their place. And conservative magazines, while less heterodox than their liberal counterparts, also face competition from ultra-partisan blogs like Power Line, Time's 2004 blog of the year (sample quote: "It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice.")

Ironically enough, the liberal writers who decry the excesses of capitalism have failed to recognize what it is doing to their business. In a marketplace where publications compete on partisanship and ideological consistency, our democracy loses.

Take a look at that last sentence and think about the mindset that decrees that when publications compete on partisanship and ideological consistency -- that is, on the presentation of clearly differing viewpoints (which I think is accurate, considering the splinters that the traditional ideological camps have broken into) -- then democracy loses.

This is democracy, SFB, at its most energetic and most alive. Last I remember, someone -- probably Jefferson, who was eminently quotable -- referred to that as the "free marketplace of ideas." (It was probably really someone like Frankfurter, but I'm not worried enough about it to look it up.) And people like Nyhan hate it.

Not that I want to accuse Nyhan of elitism, but -- well, OK -- he's an elitist, which are generally the first to rail against that brawling example of total democracy known as the Internet.

I ran across this via Retardo Montalban at Sadly, No!, who missed the real issue completely:

This is the real workings of democracy. It's not civilized, it's not well-behaved, and it's completely unfiltered -- we get to decide what we look at. The only limit on what you find on the Internet is what your porn blocker is set for, and you get to set the porn blocker.

Strangely enough, the aristocratic centrists don't like it any more than the knuckle-dragging rightists or the latte-sipping leftists do.

Why am I not surprised?