I just received in the mail the hard-copy edition of the Sixteenth Annual Theodore H. White Lecture, hosted by the Joan Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School at Harvard. Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of the New Republic gave the lecture on October 27, 2005. The full text is worth reading. (It is available online as a video file, but I can’t find the text online yet; looks like previous iterations have been posted in PDF.) Since it is not easily in text form yet, I thought I’d excerpt a bit from the end of
his lecture, right before Q&A (at which point Alex Jones, the distinguished director of Shorenstein, steps back in to moderate).
“Let me just end with a word about what this means for liberal journalism, because one of the striking things about the bloggers is that they are not only activists, but they are journalists, too. The blogs blur that division. Their stress on tactics, on winning elections rather than on first principle, I think, is bad for liberal opinion writing.
“The bloggers are helping to create a journalistic culture with too much focus on what will help Democrats win, too much interest in the short-term. And it’s producing cramped, small-bore, predictable and, perhaps worst of all, dull political writing. It’s not what liberals need today. It’s not what opinion journalism needs today. It’s not even what the Democratic Party needs today, and I don’t think Teddy White would have approved.”
The right call to arms, missing the point, or some of both? What do you think? Where are we headed with respect to the Internet and democracy — getting better or headed for disaster? Get in the game. It will matter.
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