The New Repub­lic has of late played hos­ted to a debate on demo­cracy and the news media. Hard-boiled read­ers of this blog will know that it doesn’t believe in the demo­cratic nour­ish­ment provided by news con­tent, but is more agnostic on the role played in demo­cracy by media institutions.

Seconds out, in the newsprint-coloured trunks, Paul Starr steps in with Good­bye to the Age of News­pa­pers (Hello to a New Era of Cor­rup­tion).

So con­vinced is Starr of his moral pos­i­tion, when it comes to defend­ing the role of Amer­ican news­pa­pers as gov­ernance and democracy-improvers, that he fails to land a single punch.

The only real evid­ence he offers (and at least we don’t get Amartya Sen on fam­ine and a free press [Journal of Demo­cracy 10.3 (1999), pages 7–8] in India again — see this) cites this paper -The Rise of the Fourth Estate: How News­pa­pers Became Inform­at­ive and Why It Mattered — and its appeal­ing but unsub­stan­ti­ated hypothesis:

From 1870 to 1920, when cor­rup­tion appears to have declined sig­ni­fic­antly within the United States, the press became more inform­at­ive, less par­tisan, and expan­ded its cir­cu­la­tion con­sid­er­ably. It seems a reas­on­able hypo­thesis that the rise of the inform­at­ive press was one of the reas­ons why the cor­rup­tion of the Gil­ded Age was sharply reduced dur­ing the sub­sequent Pro­gress­ive Era.

The paper is actu­ally an account of how the Amer­ican press became more inform­at­ive and less par­tisan using a couple of case stud­ies. And — no dis­respect — but any­one who has ever read any­thing by Michael Schud­son’s Dis­cov­er­ing The News (1978) kind of gets that.

So much for Starr.

In the other corner is Har­vard kick-boxer Yochai Ben­k­ler with The newspaper’s decline does not por­tend any­thing resem­bling the end of demo­cracy. Here’s why….

Ben­k­ler calls Starr’s piece ‘well-researched’ and ‘thought­ful’ (‘the bow’) before launch­ing into his own grand-standing routine.

Benkler’s vis­ion of the future sees a con­sol­id­ated MSM (no, really!), but in between dis­miss­ing news­pa­pers for fail­ing to pre­vent the Iraq War, he pins his hopes on a grass­roots ‘net­worked’ future of rad­ical indi­vidu­als and well-meaning pres­sure groups (which sounds rather old fash­ioned — the Lon­don Cor­res­pond­ing Soci­ety anyone?).

He doesn’t exam­ine the coun­ters to this vis­ion of hope: pub­lic indif­fer­ence, cor­por­ate cam­paign­ing, and gov­ern­ment com­mu­nic­a­tions. Instead it’s Talk­ing Points Memo and the Sun­light Found­a­tion con­tra mun­dum.

Now, bless them both, but even with a little legis­lat­ive help to let them uncover scan­dal (which could also add con­sid­er­able oper­a­tional costs to many com­pan­ies and organ­iz­a­tions) they lack the insti­tu­tional impact of the news media as was (see David Simon).

And neither man really gets to the point, which is not about news­pa­pers but ulti­mately about the effect­ive oper­a­tion (warn­ing: highly con­test­able term) of a demo­cratic sys­tem of government.

Shame.