Medium is the Message...

Make sure to check out Spencer Ackerman's two part interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. Spencer, who now works at the Washington Independent, has a fascinating perspective on the way in which journalism has developed in the age of new media. Long story short, the interaction between reader and journalist is far more dynamic now than it once was, and the story itself more fluid.

Spencer also talks a bit about coming at national security reporting from a progressive perspective, and in particular how, four or five years ago, there was a dearth of progressive work on military oriented issues. I think that there's some truth to this, but that it's more complicated than Spencer suggests. There have always, in the academy, been progressives and leftists working on security and military questions. However, that progressives have been working on security questions doesn't necessarily mean that a particularly progressive vision of strategy developed; on the left broadly conceived, there were always a multiplicity of views about the role that military force played in national strategy, and there weren't any particular poles to which these views could be attracted and made to cohere. It's not entirely different on the conservative side, of course; conservatives vary a lot in their national strategy and national security preferences. Conservatives, however, created and maintained a set of institutions (Heritage, AEI) that could produce coherent conservative visions of foreign policy. This didn't happen so much on the left, at least prior to 9/11, which meant that the progressive conversation on foreign policy sometimes approached cacaphony.

This has, I think, changed substantially in the past nine years, in large part because of the work of folks like Spencer. The development of viable foreign policy think tanks on the left (CAP) has also helped. This is not to say that one can visit a left wing blog and find foreign policy consensus in the comment thread, but it does mean that there are developing centers of foreign policy thought that produce progressive approaches to national strategy. There is no single voice, but then neither is there a single voice emanating from the right on intervention, military spending, and so forth.

Something else that's implicit in the Ackerman interview is the degree to which the journalist as objective reporter of events has fallen by the wayside. Spencer is a progressive journalist of national security, just as Eli Lake is a conservative national security specialist. To use the term "bias" to describe either makes little sense; both work from a particular perspective, and their product needs to be evaluated in the context of that perspective. It has always been so to some degree, but both Eli and Spencer lead political lives that are sufficiently public to remove uncertainty regarding their affiliations. There are drawbacks to this model (arguments that are simply indefensible on the facts manage to survive much longer than they ought), it's hard to argue that the "World round or flat? Opinions differ" model that mainstream media outlets have adopted is superior.

On a final, somewhat related note, I have always been relatively open about my political views in the classroom. This is altogether different than pushing my political views; students progressive or conservative should know where I'm coming from when they evaluate the claims that I make. I also lead a life sufficiently public that it would be impossible to hide what I believe. It seems to work out, as the complaints on the evaluations rarely focus on how I'm either a raging liberal or a tool of the bourgeois establishment.