The Gotterdammerung-of-mainstream-media argument has a weak and a strong formulation. …

The strong version is most associated with Dave Winer, a grumpy California software programmer best known for helping to develop the Web-feed format RSS and for his blog, Scripting News. Winer has written, and not without glee, “Fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists. … Everyone is now a journalist.”

If media companies can’t earn money, and everyone is a journalist, it follows that “amateurs” (Shirky) and “sources” (Winer) will be part of a “decentralized” media (Winer), whose stories will be distributed by “excitable 14-year-olds” (Shirky).

This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media. True, the journalists who write about these matters for mainstream media often know as little; I didn’t understand much until I became the publisher of Technology Review as well as its editor in chief. But Shirky and Winer are disgruntled consumers and, as bloggers, advocates for an insurrection. Thus, they are to be read skeptically. Their prescriptions would be more convincing if they were less polemical and better informed by some knowledge of what publishers sell.

Winer’s been treated like an informed media expert for years, but his entire professional experience in journalism consists of writing commentary for Wired for one year back in the ’90s.

Pontin goes on to say on Twitter, when criticized over the piece, that “These people are, I think, insane. Filled with hostility, completely impractical, and, in the final analysis, dishonest.” Winer doesn’t know journalism, but at least one journalist knows him pretty well.

In his most recent post Winer makes the following claim:

Financially, things are looking terrible at AP — as at other news organizations. There’s a general downward trend in the economics of news, and that’s amplified by the downturn in the economy. If we could see AP’s balance sheet, we might conceive of something desperate ourselves…

In the comments, an astute reader notes:

You can read the AP’s balance sheet, Dave, and it’s not at all in bad shape as you claim.

link

In fact, revenues were up and the AP is in the black, despite it being a non-profit and only needing to break even. AP makes money selling content, not something many people can claim.

Dave’s response seems worth an EoW blog post, IMHO.

So what was Dave’s response?

Then there must be something else they saw that made them freak.

The strong reaction was observable. The reason for it, not so clear.

Which is basically his way of saying “I’m still right, even if my facts are wrong.”

Thanks for the email!

Dave’s logic on Rev. Wright goes like this: people were attacking Obama with clips from this pastor. Because Obama is “good”, Wright must also be good. Because he’s good, those clips must be “taken out of context” and the reports about them misleading. Because Wright was kind and human during a TV interview (that he did specifically to try to help Obama), that proves he’s good.

Surprising to nobody, but in the interest of disclosure: I don’t plan to vote for Obama in November. That said, I don’t particularly care about the Wright clips. I find them disturbing and the product of a patently silly line of reasoning, but I don’t attribute any of those qualities to Obama simply because he sat through some of Wright’s sermons. That’s a pretty ridiculous logical gap to be leaping.

That said, the media didn’t get the Wright story “wrong”. Wright said all of the things that they claim he said and, whatever Dave might insist, “context” did nothing to make them sound any better. So he goes on TV, puts on his “I love everybody” face, and makes nice with a soft interviewer. That doesn’t mean he’s actually good/smart/nice/kind/loving. It means he can appear that way on TV. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have some crazy, backwards beliefs. And it most certainly doesn’t mean that he never said (or didn’t mean) the things he preached in the video clips.

But, in Dave’s world, once you go on TV and make nice with the camera, your sins just melt away — which is what makes the Tucker example so perfect. Tucker committed an act of unspeakable depravity. She took the lives of two innocent people, and did it in such a vicious and violent way that the State of Texas (and a jury of her peers) felt the only acceptable punishment was death.

The fact that she went on TV and claimed to have found Jesus and changed her ways didn’t change anything. She had still killed two people. Even if we assume that she wasn’t lying to try to save her own life (something some people will never be convinced of), so what? What’s done was done, and there were consequences. (Also, for full disclosure, I don’t support the death penalty for a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this post)

That’s precisely the case here. Rev. Wright said some things that made people uncomfortable. Him making nice on TV doesn’t change that.