Television Radio Museum: News, Views & Confuse

I always have mixed emotions about events like the one last week at the Museum of Television & Radio on the “blending of news and views”. On the one hand you can hear from interesting people and learn things you did not know. On the other hand, events like this tend to confuse the notion of bloggers as “outsiders” by presenting media “insiders’ as outsiders thus allowing the traditional media to appear supportive of new ideas (e.g, bringing the audience into the newsroom) while providing themselves the false comfort of placing a benign veneer on top of a highly disruptive (for them) event - the disintermediation of traditional news organizations by social networking services and citizen media. Try as I might, I can not seem to shake the uneasy feeling that these events are little more than attempts by gatekeepers to maintain control of the media agenda by putting forward as citizen media “thought leaders” those who call for better gates while ignoring the bloggers and citizen journalists busily sapping the foundations on which those gates rest.

I couldn’t find a link to an official page about the event but Jeff Jarvis and Vaughn Ververs offer summaries from which I have been able to piece together the following:

The event was four hours long, it was “convened” by Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine and Jon Klein of CNN. The moderator was former CBS News President Andrew Heyward. In particular, participants were Jim Brady, Executive Editor of the Washingtonpost.com, Aaron Brown ex-CNN'er, Lou Dobbs of CNN, Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman of NPR, Tom Easton of The Economist magazine, Merrill Brown of MMB Media, Jonathan Landman, Deputy Managing Editor of The New York Times, Emily Lazar, producer of The Colbert Report, David Carr of The New York Times, Peter Hart of FAIR and "bloggers" Hugh Hewitt (author and radio show host), Jay Rosen (former reporter and journalism professor), Dan Gillmor (former reporter and newspaper columnist), Amanda Congdon (actress), Vaughn Ververs (former political reporter).

Vaughn Ververs describes the event as putting together “newspaper editors, television executives, bloggers and critics” as if this was a diverse group of people. Based on the names mentioned by Jarvis and Ververs there were 16 people at the event - all of them white, almost all of them men, almost all of them to the left politically and almost all of them long-time media insiders.

No offense to Emily Lazar but I’m going to climb out on a limb here and say that Jeff was hoping to get Stephen Colbert on the heels of WHCA Dinner performance and settled for the show’s booker instead. To be fair, ex-CNN’er Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices was probably also on the short list for this event so perhaps things balanced out. The panel appears to have a decidedly liberal tilt with just one member (Hewitt) identifiably to the right.

Setting aside the lack of racial, gender and political diversity, the notion that the panel was intellectually diverse because it included “bloggers” is what concerns me. The bloggers who participated are, to a man, media insiders who happen to have a blog (I’m leaving out Amanda Congdon because I’m not where what to make of her role in Rocketboom and whether to count her as a vlogger). From the limited accounts of the event so far , it appears that most of the bloggers were making the same points about transparency and trust relationships, “opening up” newsrooms and listening to the audience. That’s all to the good but this event was less “outsiders” v. “insiders” and more like “initiated media” (with regards to blogging and the new media landscape) to “uninitiated media”. Jeff, Jay, Dan, Hugh and Vaugh may be “made guys” in the blogosphere but they are certainly not “outsiders”.

I do not have a problem with any of the blogger panelists per se. Jeff, Dan and Jay are all founding members of the MBA. They and the others are all smart, thoughtful and experienced people. They are certainly more accomplished than me as journalists and bloggers. I also understand why the same folks are heard from again and again and don’t begrudge the Museum of Television & Radio their desire to put on a “star-studded” event.

In the future, however, if organizers of events like this one find themselves struggling to get a more balanced panel let me humbly suggest they give me a ring. I’ve got plenty of MBA members who are quite capable of providing valuable insight on the emerging media landscape. Here is just a sampling of MBA members I might have recommended to Jeff and Joel had they asked: B.L. Ochman, LaShawn Barber, Barbara Iverson, Anastsia Goodstein, Chris Nolan, Susan Mernit, John Amato, Mark Tapscott, Susan DeFife, Wendy Hoke, Jennifer McClure, Cori Dauber...I could go on but suffice to say the MBA has a membership full of folks who are ready and willing to add their voice to the dialog at events like the “news and views” session at the Museum of Television & Radio.