Djelloul Marbrook

While we play factual ping pong with the debate about Internet publishing its most profound issue, cultural gatekeeping, keeps getting lost.

There is a story about Kindle, the Amazon hand-held reading device. Ping. Then there is a story about copyright. Pong. There is a story about the Big Six book publishers worrying about market share. Ping. Another story about Amazon herding small presses towards its own print-on-demand press. Pong. And so it goes.

But who will be the cultural arbiters for the next one hundred years? Certainly the book publishers and the film industry and the press and its advertisers have enjoyed that privileged position. Who next? What next? Google? It certainly has been amassing power. Microsoft? It knows a thing or two about marketing. Apple, the innovation maven? The telecommunications giants, like Viacom, Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp? Who will tell us who is in and out, what is cool and what is not? How about Amazon, talk about marketing?

It will not be the academy, not enough money, albeit it is a business machine. It probably will not be the Big Six book publishers, because they still have not made up their minds where the action is or how to cash in on it. So who is going to have the means to bend our minds?

Well, some beasts are so big that it is hard to define them. For example, when Spiro T. Agnew, a man who found the truth an itchy suit, warned against the wrongdoing of our liberal press a fairly big number of us believed him when he said the press is left-leaning. Could have fooled me, and I worked for newspapers all my life. But it was a lie certain people were and are predisposed to believe. The best that can be said of this lie is that it confuses a commitment to investigate wrongdoing with leftist bias. Although there are fewer and fewer news organizations interested in investigative journalism, some of the most famously investigative newspapers in the past have been moderately Republican. Agnew’s experiences were shaped by the scrutiny The Baltimore Sun gave his public life in Maryland. The Sun at the time was a highly regarded, moderate and locally owned newspaper with an illustrious investigative history. It would have been a stretch to call it liberal, but it certainly was aggressive and responsible, and Agnew’s public life did not stand up well to its scrutiny.

So we are going to have to be careful how we define whatever beast happens to emerge as the preeminent cultural arbiter. It is much easier to imagine Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp or Fox News as gatekeepers and arbiters than it is to imagine Slate, Salon, The Drudge Report or the Huffington Post. The reason is the nature of the Internet itself. The Internet enables hyper-texting, and inherent in this ability to fly from one story to another, and from contemporary story to archive makes it difficult for any one news organization to corral and shape opinion.

When I hawked newspapers on Eighth Avenue in the 1950s in Manhattan there were seven daily newspapers. Sometimes, when I got tired of turning the headlines into a sales spiel, I would say something like, Pick ya poison, pick ya poison. Today, surfing the Internet, our poisons are myriad, and we can research any particular article as deeply as we wish, so the Internet is hardly analogous to those seven metropolitan dailies, good as they were.

When the Gutenberg press broke onto the scene, the church muttered to itself, We’ve got to have that contraption or we’ll lose our grip. And that is exactly what the telecom giants are muttering now. They want that contraption, in this case the Internet, not only to wring money out of it but to frame society according to their vision of it as a docile cash cow.

While the pols and the pundits who love them wonk about this and that, the struggle goes on under the radar to control the very means by which we will communicate in the foreseeable future. The telecom behemoths delight that we worry about Obama this and McCain that, Social Security and Medicare, Iraq, Iran and whatever comes to mind, because they have set their sites on the Internet. No ping pong for them, they want to wrap up and carry off the whole game.

The polls show that voters are concerned about the economy first, then Iraq, then health care. In any list of ten concerns control of the Internet nowhere appears, and yet whoever controls the Internet will control discourse about all these concerns. More ominous still is that the public doesn’t appreciate the ramifications of this, because vested interests in the public and private sector have held the issue down under the radar in order to decide it before the public grasps its significance, much as President Bush is trying to ram an imperialist compact down Iraq’s throat in the waning days of his presidency without debate in Congress, even though it is clearly a treaty that requires congressional ratification. By packaging it as an alliance he is trying to subvert the Senate’s authority. It is precisely this issue of packaging that we must unwrap. The telecom giants are claiming that since they have spent so much money to improve Internet transmission they should be allowed to control access to it by imposing pricing controls. This is packaging of a raw power grab. The telecom giants are already making money on the Internet, which the Defense Department with tax money, not they, developed in the first place. The questionable impulse to privatize government operations is working in their favor.

Privatization, as we have seen in Iraq where we have had to hire mercenaries to fight an undermanned war, is fraught with theoretical and practical problems. It has enhanced the influence of lobbyists, encouraged the corruption of public officials and accelerated the export of American jobs. And that’s just for starters. There are issues of accountability and quality control, too. But with a government in the throes of this privization vogue, the chances of the telecom industry hijacking the Internet are heightened.

The press critic A.J. Liebling once wrote that journalism is the weakest slat under the bed of democracy. That being the case, and my life’s experience in journalism convinces me it is, we need to do everything we can to strengthen that slat. Making the web inhospitable to freewheeling citizen journalism, which telecom control would certainly do, would stress that slat even more.—DM