This story about the current Italian elections tells you all you need to know about the seriousness with which the western media take politics overseas. Berlusconi has pledged to abstain from screwing til after the election, supposedly to attract the family values crowd. Even the Pope thinks that's bullshit, judging from last weekend's encyclical. Of course, his wife is twenty years younger than him.

Meanwhile, in the Italian press itself, the key news is about Berlusconi's resistance to the law requiring equal treatment of opposing candidates on television. He calls this version of the fairness doctrine "liberticide." (It sounds better in Italian.) The majestic equality of the laws, which forbids the rich as well as the poor from begging, stealing bread, and sleeping under bridges. That's (more or less) a quote from Anatole France, who also said, "In any well regulated society, wealth is a sacred thing. In a democracy, it's the only sacred thing."

What interests me about blogs.

I started browsing the blogospere because I study the public sphere. I was drawn to Habermas's account of the decline of the public sphere, and to C. Wright Mills' analysis of the power of the media in his classic The Power Elite. The blogosphere looked like a potential answer to both of them. I thought I'd do scholarship on the blogosphere, but I sort of figured out that the bloggers themselves were already making every point I'd want to make about the blogosphere, and doing it much more effectively than I would. So I was drawn in in another way. During the run-up to the Iraq war, and even more in the 2004 election, I found myself browsing the blogosphere as a supplement and a guide to the news.

Many keystrokes have been devoted to the question of the relationship of the blogosphere to the mainstream media, and particularly to mainstream journalism. My favorite blogs--Juan Cole's Informed Comment, Kevin Drum's Political Animal, Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo, and Andrew Sullivan, to throw in someone who bats from the right side of the plate--all have a track record in mainstream media, and all have a complicated relationship to both printed media and established journalism practice. But with a difference.

A blogger is a journalist working in a journalism that hasn’t been invented yet. At least the ones I like are. That is, they’re doing all the things journalists do with facts–discovering them, relaying them, putting them in dialog with each other, giving voice to points of view, representing the public–but doing so without a worked out theory, a journalism, to govern their activities. The credibility of a journalist usually comes from fidelity to a worked out code of journalism. Because there isn’t yet a worked out code of journalism for the blogosphere, and because the on line environment has unsettled all the worked out codes elsewhere (more about that another time, or refer to certain published thoughts of mine), the credibility of a blogger has to come from somewhere else. Sometimes it can come from her or his expertise–hence my hero Juan Cole, the master of the unpublished thought for historians. Sometimes it comes from his or her evident intelligence. This is the case with Kevin Drum. He has his expertise, but its not really the key to his authority. It’s that it’s just him doing his thing in a pretty transparent way. It’s nothing you couldn’t do. You really could.

But you’d have to be somebody. That is, only someone with a specific and evidently real personal existence can win the conviction that a blogger needs. This may not be a hard fact of the medium. Maybe any chucklehead can pull it off, and heaven knows there are enough liars in the blogosphere who seem to do perfectly well. But no one can pull it off without constructing a convincing persona. And that’s the key difference–in newspaper journalism, your persona is supposed to be universal, not specific. Even when a newspaper journalist achieves a byline, the byline is less a form of authorial identification than it is a warrant that the journalist’s personal existence had nothing whatever to do with the content of the article.

What Drum and Sullivan get from their journalism disciplines is something other than the effacing of their personalities. What they get is an economy of style. One of the things I hate in a blog, and one reason why I’m not a more regular reader of Jay Rosen’s excellent PressThink, is verbosity. Good writing is never verbose, wordy, or redundant. Rosen, whom I met once and then only briefly but who is a big fish in the same pool I swim in, is smart and honest and perceptive, but takes a long time making his point. Sullivan never does.

If each good blog has an economy of style, though, the blogosphere as a whole is supremely repetitive.

It follows that, if blogging represents a new journalism in the process of becoming itself, it does not necessarily represent a new system of political discourse. The existing journalism produces a dysfunctional system of discourse in spite of (or because of) its virtues as a journalism--evenhandedness, a need to efface authorship, the denial of values or commitments, a deference to established authority and expertise. The emerging journalism seems to be producing complementary dysfunctions because of its opposite virtues--spontaneity, personality, transparency, copiousness, hostility to privileged authority. But maybe that's because it hasn't really invented itself as a journalism yet.

Yesterday I ran across this item from the NYTimes. It deals with the ongoing Italian election campaign, which I'm following on the ground in northern Italy by reading the Italian newspapers. It's a good example of the sort of content that makes readers distrust the media in direct proportion to their level of knowledge on a given subject. If I didn't know better, I'd've thought this was a pretty good, though not very deep, report on a specific controversy. It's not.

The report is about how Silvio Berlusconi is outmaneuvering his opposition by using his media properties and pressuring the government to extend the legislative session by two weeks. Each individual item in the report is true, of course; the problem is what's left out. Berlusconi got the extension of the legislative session, but what he'd asked for was that plus a postponement of the general election from 9 April until early May. He didn't get that. The outcome was a compromise. Why Berlusconi (the Cavalier, as the press calls him) wanted the election postponed is obvious--he's trailing badly in the polls because of a raft of corruption charges that have been dogging him for years. The reason why he wanted the extension of the legislative session is more complicated. One reason--a bill that's been sent back to the legislature for more work--is too squirrely to quickly describe, and not really interesting to anyone who doesn't already follow Italian politics. The other reason involves his media properties. A law has been passed that will require broadcasters to devote equal time to the opposition during the campaign. This law will kick in when the legislature adjourns. Berlusconi wants the extra time to use his media properties to flood the public with his image. This aspect of the extension is under continuing debate; it's possible that the government will put the equal time law into effect before the legislature adjourns.

Why does the Times article not fill us in? Well, there could be many reasons. The details may have gotten cut during editing. The reporter, Ian Fisher, covers a lot of territory, which would cultivate a habit of simplifying. Or he may like Berlusconi, though his other reports on Italian politics wouldn't necessarily support that. More likely it's a case of over-convenient framing.
Two key frames characterize the article. One is Berlusconi the sly survivor. Choosing this frame calls forth the expert commentary on how he's going to come from behind, which (and I admit I'm rooting against him) is partisan cheerleading. A left partisan wants to read this treatment as biased.

The other key frame is the one you find most common in US coverage of foreign elections. It is the Americanization theme, which also emphasizes television. Every British election since I started paying attention, for instance, has been written about as the "first American election" in that country, meaning that it's the first one in which television dominates the discourse.
The Americanization theme understates the issue in Italy, though. It's not television, it's the (more or less) monopoly control of television that's the issue, and it's way beyond US proportions. Berlusconi is not merely the Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch of Italy. His media empire is really unrivaled within the country. He dominates broadcasting the way that right wing voices in the US dominate talk radio. But hey, talk radio is just radio, and the right wing isn't just one guy.

The cavalier's stranglehold on the broadcast environment resembles the state of the US media before the great depression. Then a media mogul like William Randolph Hearst seemed to exercise such power that a wide array of ordinary people wanted the federal government to control media ownership, or set up public alternatives to the commercial media, or do other things that made media owners in general run scared of "communistic" schemes and even try to clean up their own houses. The depression ended Hearst's glory days, and the "professional" standards that came out of this turmoil reassured the public that the power of the press wouldn't be exploited for personal political ambitions.

Since World War II, it's been considered unsophisticated in the US to believe that the media can manipulate public opinion. The US media system is supposed to be too diverse and too disciplined (by professional standards AND by the market) for this to happen. Reporters especially believe this, and are actually reassured that BOTH the left and the right think they're biased. This complacency gets transferred to other national contexts in mainstream reporting, unless some explicit form of censorship or government ownership is involved. So any US professional reporter is more or less programmed to think of the private sector as the area of freedom, and to think of a mogul like Berlusconi as a colorful scalawag rather than a threat to democracy. On the other hand, a publicly owned broadcast system (like RAI in Italy) will be much more suspect.

Too longwinded, this post, but here's the point. There's a systematic blindness to the problem of media monopoly in US news discourse, and it makes it difficult to see how bad things can get. Things can get pretty damned bad. You know, Italy wound up in Iraq too.

Unpublished thoughts.

I’m punning, of course, on the criticism leveled at overambitious academics–“she’s never had an unpublished thought.” I don’t recall when I first heard that one. It must have been in graduate school. I did my grad work in a history department, and the scorn we were supposed to feel toward the trendier academics was incorporated in a number of such one-liners, like “the leisure of the theory class.” When I moved into the field of communication, of course, I was surrounded by members of the theory class, many of whom had never had an unpublished thought, at least by historians’ standards.

Here’s what historians think you ought to do to publish a thought. First, you ought to figure out every possible topic it could be connected with, and then you ought to read every available thing that’s ever been published about any of those topics. Then, you ought to find a cache of unexplored primary documents that bear on your thought. After thoroughly analyzing these documents, you may make a claim that you have something new to say, but, before publishing your thought, you should present it in oral form to your colleagues, to fellow researchers in the primary material, and then to academic gatherings. At that point you are ready to submit it to referees, who will tell you how to revise it before publishing it. Then you may have a published thought. Otherwise, all your thoughts should remain unpublished.

But not unspoken. One of the tricks of the trade is to have a lively but secluded private network of conversation, where unpublished thoughts are expressed and exchanged. It is in the unpublished arena that historians, and other interpretive communities, of course, coordinate the standards that will eventually determine what will be publishable, and it is in these arenas that the distinction between real and fake work will be drawn. If you aren’t connected to these arenas of unpublished thoughts, you will likely never be able to cross the barrier to having published thoughts, at least in the more austere fields of cultural–and political–work.

This is why I love the blogosphere. It makes it possible to extend access to the arenas of unpublished thought in interesting ways. This doesn’t mean it does away with expertise, or the standards of publication, but that it allows for a different kind of publicness. It lets a guy like me, who might set himself up as an expert, speak in relatively inexpert terms to an audience of no one in particular–perhaps no one at all–but at the same time perhaps everyone. It lets me air out my thoughts, but leaves them still unpublished.

It stands for the free play of the mind.

Which at one time was the only thing I was sure I believed in.