Modul Mata Kuliah Journalisme Online - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Keen agreed that critical analysis — performed by trained journalists — is vital. However, he remained
certain of his righteous cause: “We have nothing to learn from children,” he said, provoking a growl or
gasp from many in the audience of some 300 people. His reference, if I’m not mistaken, was to
Facebook users, and to the repeated examples offered by Harfoush and Brody of how younger people
interact with media today.
“It’s a return to the medieval,” Keen said. Today we have an elite of super media-literate individuals,
while everyone else is swimming in garbage.
Friday’s keynote speaker expressed some of the same ideas, although in a less arrogant manner.
“Our audiences are literally drowning in information,” said Mike Oreskes, executive editor of The
International Herald Tribune and author of a new book about the U.S. Constitution. (You’d think a guy
who’s spent 30 years in journalism would have learned to use the word literally correctly.)
“The solution to information overload is journalism,” Oreskes said. People want orientation and
direction to lead them through the thicket of information. This sounded a lot like Keen, to me, and not
like what I had heard from Brody and Harfoush. (Read more from Oreskes’s speech.)
How Do You Decide What to Believe?
Brody said people don’t trust — and don’t want to trust — only one news source. The days of the
authoritative source have ended. “They want to triangulate truth on their own,” he said.
“If you care, you’re going to pursue the information,” Harfoush said. There are topics that a given person
does not consider interesting, but the same person will invest time and effort in finding out more about
other topics. This is true whether that person is clicking on the Internet or standing in front of a rack of
magazines at the newsstand. (Mathew Ingram live-blogged this panel discussion.)
I was wondering whether journalists can make people care. I think if you tell a story really well, you can.
Oreskes worries that “the solar system of YOU” (referred to by Brody on Wednesday night) is in mortal
conflict with “the actual solar system” of reality, the world outside your personal life. The victim of that
mortal conflict might be democracy itself, because democracy requires consensus and compromise —
and you can’t achieve those if you don’t understand other people.
I’ll be the first to stand up and agree with Oreskes that a key role of journalism is to help people
understand the world — both the world outside their own home and the world on the other side of an
ocean. But I question his assertion that there exists “an actual solar system” that any one journalist can
accurately portray. The world represented by one person, or one news organization, is never going to be
the same as the world seen by every other person. Everyone lives in the center of “the solar system of
YOU.”
Call Up Merleau-Ponty