Slate's Dots & the End of the Journalist-Priest

Slate magazine in the US has turned the 'news' into a graphic concept that relates one story with another in order to give us a total picture of this thing called 'news'. You will have to take a look at the original posting in order to understand what follows but the effort is worth it.

The very fact of such a graphic emerging now is a sign that the web and the online-comfortable generation are increasingly thinking in images as much as words. Many kids under 20 now explore narrative as much, maybe more, through graphic novels and TV series as written texts.

Words connect us with reality in one way and pictures in another. Our perceptions of social reality may change reality itself so changes in how we acquire and process information are important in assessing what sort of culture and society we may become in the future.

Consider how religion and culture were taught, in the High Middle Ages, through priest-mediated verbal reference to images and objects until mass literacy and printing centred minds on texts. Total personal embedding of oneself in a Bible changed politics and society radically over subsequent centuries.

As for Slate's tool, we like it. It is useful for understanding how the media are constructing our world and how the readers of a particular journal or online news aggregator might be being directed to see the world - but it is not what the world is actually like!

It is a simulacrum. A version of the world. If anything, Slate's graphic demonstrates the extent of the likely distance of 'news' from truth.

Religious truth mediated by priests was replaced with an intellectual free-for-all by the seventeenth century. This process may be about to be repeated in the impending loss of intermediary command of what passes for political truth as a result of technological change.

Journalists have dined out for decades on their position as the Fourth Estate - the purveyors of 'truth' to the masses.  In fact, they have colluded, through the cult of the Editor, in the construction of social realities that have been layered over public life to maintain social cohesion.

Not much differentiates the Catholic Church and (by our time) the liberal media in terms of their functional role within the societies they dominate. Even the moral panics and outrage of the tabloid end of the market have a taste of Savonarola.

A bubble is about to be punctured here. Like all social, intellectual and economic bubbles, many insiders have long seen it coming. If they have not gone into denial, they have decided either to 'gather ye rosebuds' while they may in the old system or plan in advance for survival as it collapses.

Now look at the chart again. "Subjects—represented by the circles below—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned." Well, that's pretty clear! Big dots mean big media interest.

By all means, play with the dots. Enjoy yourself. But now stand back and study the chart more closely. It is very understandable that Slate should prioritise American news (as a London medium might prioritise British) but the insularity beyond this is startling because Slate does move outside American territory.

The transatlantic connection is there (due to the huffing and puffing over Al-Megrahi), suggesting a natural cultural bond between London and Washington. There are references to China and Germany. Look deeper and you will see references to America's Asian and European allies and Russia.

However, other than one mega-complex of interest, no other country is mentioned in a top-line way other than Mexico (and then only in connection with swine flu).

The mega-complex is, of course, the 'war zone' covering Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel. Even the German reference relates to it as do the London-Libyan and Sudan stories by terror and Islamist implication - and many of the 'allied' stories.

It is not that this zone is not important but that this snapshot of the globe excludes entirely South America, Africa (except Sudan) and Australasia and largely excludes most of Europe and the bulk of Asia (with a nod to the Koreas and the Japanese economy).

The internal affairs of populous China are not quite ignored (though as near as dammit) but India's seem to be. As far as 'real news' is concerned, the world would appear to consist of a) the United States of America and b) a relatively small war torn chunk of the Middle East and West Asia. Insular or what?

It is also startling that, other than the Cadbury takeover and (largely political) references to health care reform in the US, economic references are limited and densely collected around 'oil'. Saudi Arabia is pigeon-holed completely as oil and terror, even Singapore as mostly an oil-related story.

Where are the references to food security issues or the turmoil in Africa or developments in a missing Bric (Brazil) or political tensions in Europe? The US Open gets more coverage than any of these!

And this gets back to the debate about what journalism should be for because it certainly does not seem to be about providing a rounded view of the world to Americans - or the British from our experience.

We might go further - as high priests of the 'old system', the journalistic profession, in their galloping herd instinct, are not merely committing the venal sin of omitting great tracts of human experience but are committing the mortal sin of giving us a skewed and flawed view of the world we have to negotiate.

Yes, the 'war zone' is vitally important in terms of energy flows and global peace but the sense is that the obsession with it creates the involvement that in turn creates the news coverage. Precisely how important is this region to the American national interest compared to others? We have our doubts.

If there is one fundamental reason why our political class keeps making major policy mistakes and their publics are constantly being surprised by 'black swan' events, it may lie in the failings of this class of self-absorbed secular priests who only write for each other and for our expectations.

Of course, this is not entirely fair on many journalists who investigate on their own account (where they can get the funds) or who at least move outside well worn territory - even if one often suspects the hand of dipomatic or NGO spin doctors in the process.

Slate's intellectual toy raises interesting questions about the meaningfulness of the information supplied to us. Are new technologies not merely undercutting the economics of the old media but undermining its cultural authority just as the printed Bible once undermined an older clerisy?

Back In The Ex-USSR: Putin Meets Obama

The meeting between Obama and Prime Minister Putin has been accorded almost equal importance to that of Obama with President Medvedev Is Medvedev good cop and Putin bad cop? Putin did not hesitate to deliver a forceful account of Moscow’s perspective on world affairs.

Once again in Russia, there was no room for Obama’s famed charm. Obamamania appears to stop with the borders of the American informal imperium – yet still there was that sense that ‘bizness’ could be done between the weakened hegemon and the recovering Slavic power.

The Limits Of Obamamania

The most interesting meeting (as reported in the Financial Times) may be the cool reception to the American President from the students and graduates of Moscow’s New Economic School, reckoned a liberal establishment by standards, certainly if compared to the adulation he has received elsewhere.

This may say something about the slow growth of a neo-nationalist mood amongst the rising young Russian elite and the development of right-wing Eurasianist ideas that stand in direct opposition to Western liberalism.

The younger generation of bourgeois Muslims and Europeans (at least in Eastern Europe) very much like the liberal and universalising message of the American President but their Russian equivalents do not – and neither, we would guess, would their equivalents in neo-nationalist China.

Nothing could express more clearly the rise of a new multi-polarity, with dissident intellectual minorities (certainly of neo-Rightists in Europe and Islamists in the Muslim world) appearing on both sides, in a replaying of the soft power games of Cold War international affairs.

Obama will certainly have irritated his hosts by meeting with opposition politicians and civil society representatives. The US still seems to find it hard to understand that countries outside its zone of influence tend to resent what they see as interference in their internal affairs.

The negative view of such soft power dialogueis a lesson being learned the hard way in both Russia and Iran bythe US' British out-rider. But the British are disposable, the Americans are not. Such meetings will be tolerated in Moscow through gritted teeth and the British dog just kicked the harder.

Iran & Spheres Of Influence

One interesting area of uncertainty is Russia’s support for the American position on Iran. The Americans are going to have to go back home and do some hard thinking on their priorities.

They have got what they wanted on Afghanistan but only because Russia has long since conceded that West Asia is part of America’s ‘sphere of influence’. The visit will have been educational for the American President.

The US persists in talking in terms of universal values whereas Russia thinks in terms of spheres of influence. Iran is seen by the US as an affront to a variety of universal values whereas Russia sees it as a pawn in the negotiation of boundaries between spheres.

In effect, Russia is saying that you (Obama) can have Iran if you concede the principle of our sphere which means concessions on more immediate interests – Ukraine and the Caucasus and influence in Eurasia.

This is a tough call for the US because increasing Russian influence in Eurasia in exchange for support on Iranian matters does not actually deliver Iran (which decides its own affairs).

It also suggests that an improved chance of control over a vital energy production zone (vital to American interests) might be traded for increased Russian leverage (also based on energy production) over its European allies.

In essence, Russia might get the propaganda victory of withdrawal of the missile shield and the US might see more pressure exerted on Iran but the American withdrawal will unnerve the Eastern Europeans about commitments to the defence from the bear and destabilise the European Union.

This, in turn, might mean a consequent potential weakening of the US’ hold over a major soft power and consumption market. In fact, the US could afford to lose a bit of ground in Eurasia because the EU is scarcely going to fall into Russian hands but the calculations are complex.

Re-Calibrating Interests

One calculation is that a resentful centre-right EU might recreate the Gaullist third way in reaction to Americans trying to run their affairs and Russians squeezing them on input costs. Anglo-Saxon strategy is to integrate the European Union as junior partner not as competitor within the Western alliance.

So, for the next few months, the Russians are likely to appreciate their Iranian bargaining chip. They provide much of the civil nuclear technology required by the regime and they have a veto in the UN. These facts alone suggest stasis.

And we can expect more rumblings from the Israelis about some strike at Iran to show that they will not be taken down so easily over the Peace Process. Even Obama seems tempted to let the Israelis do their grandstanding as counterweight to the obduracy of the Russians and the Iranians themselves.

As for Europe (or rather what passes for Europe but is an increasingly ramshackle bureaucracy with little relationship to the wider population), EU-Russian relations are pretty frosty and not helped by circulating Presidencies (first the Czech Republic and now Sweden in 2009)

History will tend to dictate how Russia is regarded by each new EU Presidency in turn. The Europeans are, of course, most interested in institutional reform, the financial crisis and the religion of climate change but energy supply from the East is never going to be far behind these first order anxieties.

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