Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

‘Too Fresh to Be True’ 151
firmly reharnesses news to politics and to the affairs of the community.
This might seem to be one of the fundamental objectives of
journalism, yet it has been routinely ignored by corporate media in
its ever more precise matching of readers and audiences to advertisers
and patterns of consumption. Drudge’s is a journalism,
however imperfect, that enables citizens to participate once more in
the democratic process. The same argument can perhaps be made for
the traditional press in the continued presence of such publications
as Private Eye in Britain; however, the traffic over the Drudge Report
averages at about 6 million a week. During a period when it is
breaking a story traffic is equivalent to or exceeds the mainstream
news sites such as New York Times. Private Eye’s circulation, on the
other hand, depends on an ageing readership and steadily declines.
Citing the philosopher Fred d’Agonstino, Iggers argues that the
logic of any claim for journalistic objectivity gives it an Archimedean
perspective, outside the system that it would intervene in. It is a
‘God’s eye view’, or, quite literally, the ‘view from nowhere’. 34 Hence
it is a perspective that forecloses on the possibility of dialectic,
conversation or interactivity. This contradicts the major potential of
the web and may well be why objectivity is increasingly eschewed for
other values such as freshness or immediacy by online journalism,
values which encourage response rather than refuse it. The trade-off
comes with severe implications for the accuracy of news which, in
turn, further discredit the general claim for objectivity. The ‘view
from nowhere’ collapses anyway when it is revealed as journalism’s
resort to the repeated and tired views of a limited range of recognised
experts. Journalists ‘cannot report [their own inferences] as facts. If
someone else draws the inferences – and usually this someone else is
an official empowered to do so – then the journalist can treat the
inference as hard facts’. 35 For reporters and editors under pressure
from deadlines it becomes routine, a kind of shorthand for the news.
The tabloids have long indicated that the market demands something
else. As ‘the Internet becomes a gigantic repository for so much
copied, mutilated and spin-distorted information and misinformation,
it becomes ever harder for readers to know what is true, what is
rumour, and who can be trusted’, 36 and we have clearly moved to a
new paradigm for news, demanding new readership skills which
render the routine redundant.