I have to give the CBC credit: they’ve done quite a lot right to remain relevant in new media circles.
The corporation’s efforts to make more content available to more people by creating an almost universal program for podcasting radio shows, and developing an ever-expanding web presence are exactly what the national broadcaster should be doing to fulfill its mandate in the 21st century. Their newest experiment in the technology of distribution, however, may go too far in responding to the pressures of the new media climate.
Certainly, a longer version of The National, a news broadcast that provides nuance and context to distinctly Canadian stories, and CBC’s new initiatives to make news available online, and for Blackberries and IPhones, is appreciated. However, the new web version of The National, in which users can customize their newscast by “selecting the news items they want to see and the order they prefer to see them”—admittedly a secondary feature in the Mother Corp’s National reforms—is potentially problematic. The initiative is not a new one, as CNN has had its own customizable webcasts on-site since 2007. The ability to select your own cast is a feature born from the idea that there is an Internet fuelled consumer mindset that pushes unfettered choice in what viewers deem to be important.
It isn’t that people have become total dictators over content so much as the curators feeding that content have become more numerous. The Internet has been a boon for the broadening of things like musical tastes, not because the people consuming it have been given unfettered choice, but because we have access to more curators than ever before, and the tools to create true mass movements around particular artists and sounds have been democratized. Bands like Grizzly Bear and Vampire Weekend have played arena-level shows thanks to blog buzz. Certainly, people are consuming more news, too, from more sources than ever before.
But unlike music, more gatekeepers in news media have not created a general broadening of perspective, but instead a sharply partisan understanding of current events. That this is symptomatic of the news-on-demand decade suggests that perhaps, in the end, we might not know what’s good for us after all.
This is not to infer that institutional news has to remain the same. Stagnant, “objective” news organizations stand to gain nothing from staying the course in the middle of technological upheaval.
Instead, institutional news media can take on a corrector’s role—an authoritative voice that can bring prominence to issues of genuine importance and try to rectify the pervasive myths of hyper-partisan blog media, rather than to re-report them, as was so prevalent during the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Network news could have been the voices that helped put the Obama-as-secret-terrorist-Muslim story to bed, instead of being the bodies that brought the issue into prominence during an organized debate (thanks again for that, George Stephanopolous). There may be no money for middle-of-the-road reporting any more, but I wager more people would come to prefer a cold, sobering shower in their news to the “shouting across the void” as Obama describes it.
There is certainly a role for institutional media in the age of the Internet, and the CBC’s experiment is likely a first step in reforming the way that institutional media provide information to the public. However, it cannot be the last one.
