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.