Posted on 11/25/2025 10:26:46 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
Reconciling abundance with authority
Three decades ago, the visionary social thinker Peter Huber published Orwell’s Revenge, a book that turned one of the twentieth century’s most haunting political parables on its head. Where George Orwell imagined a future of total information control, Huber saw the opposite: a world where digital technology shattered centralized authority. In 1984, the Ministry of Truth could rewrite history because it monopolized the tools of communication. But in the digital age, Huber argued, the networked computer would scatter those tools across society, producing an unruly democracy of voices. The Internet, he predicted, would not empower “Big Brother” but millions of “little brothers”—individuals able to report and argue and publish. What once seemed a one-way flow of information from elite institutions to a passive public was becoming a many-to-many conversation. The gatekeepers were being evicted by the code.
This technological revolution would have profound cultural consequences. As Huber memorably put it, “Better communicating machines produce more—not less—communication, more—not less—free expression, more—not less—political involvement, more—not less—freedom of thought.” The people who controlled legacy newsrooms—highly educated and overwhelmingly left-leaning—had long exercised a disproportionate power to define what counted as respectable opinion. When those gatekeepers lost influence, new kinds of voices surged through. In a book published in 2005, I described the early energies of this revolt, chronicling how talk radio, cable news, and the early Internet—all unleashed by the mutations in communications technology—disrupted liberal cultural authority. Right-of-center ideas and perspectives suddenly found much wider distribution.
The fall of the old gatekeepers also demolished journalism’s economic foundations. The media theorist Andrey Mir calls this the rise of “post-journalism”—the era in which the traditional advertising model collapsed, taking with it the profession’s claim to disinterestedness. When Internet platforms absorbed ad revenue...
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Once upon a time, the WSJ published the results of a study of college majors. These majors were rated upon the quality of students enrolling in the major (SAT scores) and the rigor of the subject matter. In both categories, Journalism majors rated second from the bottom. Education was the bottom.
Agreed. I had several different careers. I finished as an engineer supporting DOD projects but my first career was in newspapers working with journalists. My second career was at a university which trained students to become teachers. I can say with confidence that journalists and teachers ought to rank at the bottom of any quality survey.
Yeah, that was the hope. But if you think about it, the old tyrant kings had little way of knowing what you were doing in your little hovel, or what you were discussing with your neighbors. Now, they just ask Alexa or your cell phone provider. “Joe just bought a copy of the Federalist Papers on Amazon. Better keep an eye on him.”
There are no news journalists. Nothing but Mockingbirds.
It’s all Propaganda.
When I was in college, most females were working on their MRS Degree with a minor in Education. A typical graded exercise for the education majors was making a story board, ie, multiple clippings, pictures, and other art work pasted to a piece of poster board. Many couldn’t understand why their education degree didn’t pay as well as STEM.
Journalism wasn’t much better. I watched students who were one semester from flunking out suddenly become straight A students once they swithced majors to Journalism.
With cheerleaders.
A paraphrasefrom the Bogart movie “Deadline”. Jim Backus relating: “A journalist makes himself the hero of the story. A reporter just has the facts.
Now AI can do most of that work.
Two anecdotes:
I was a teenager working in a gas station (remember those?) next to a freeway overpass. I witnessed a semi truck crashing into the back of a Volkswagen van which had broken down on the shoulder, setting it on fire, dragging it along the overpass. I called Dick Hurley, the editor of the La Mirada Lamplighter, our local paper. I informed him that I saw a "ball of flames" moving across the overpass. He reported me as saying I had seen a "great ball of fire".
We have a lice acquisition system in Arizona. The Mexican families go home to Mexico for winter break and spring break, where they acquire lice, which they bring back to the classrooms. One time, Mrs. Chandler offered to screen the children for lice. The teacher said that there was no need. The school had already checked and had declared the lice problem cleared up because they had found no lice, only nits.
The fall of the old gatekeepers also demolished journalism’s economic foundations.
J. Edgar Hoover chuckles
Even earlier, the book “Who’s Afraid of 1984” came to a similar conclusion. That book has not aged well.
bump
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