Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

152 Online Journalism
Rumour further undermines the God’s eye view since its source
and its intention is unashamedly secular and social. Whether it
carries any truth or not, it forcibly reintroduces the social into the
discourse of news. It brings new values to news suggesting ‘the existence
of physical volume in the event. [Rumours] counterbalance its
pedagogic cool, its ironed-out flatness’. 37 That ‘physical volume’
reconnects it to the lived world and perhaps begins to explain the
gimcrack attractions of online news against the falling constituencies
of the traditional press. The web discards the exactitude and precision
of the technology that hosts it for much fuzzier, and perhaps
more socially productive, albeit risk-laden, standards of information.
As Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz have shown, news in the decades
before the emergence of online media was increasingly concerned
with the ‘pseudo-event’. The term includes those spectacles ranging
from sports festivals (World Cups and Olympics) to political
summits and royal weddings which are staged for the primary
purpose of being reported. Clearly such weddings and meetings must
still occur in a world with different media priorities, but they would
take very different, and more subdued, forms. Such events have
become axiomatic for news, redefining our understanding of it
within a comparatively short historical period. In so doing they have
displaced other kinds of information that journalists might cover,
including other sets of political relations, environmental issues and
the edgy dialectic between consumers and manufacturing corporations.
Dayan and Katz view such media events as essentially
anti-democratic in that they encourage the process of disintermediation
– they enable political leaders to speak directly to their
constituencies over the heads of parties and parliaments.
However liberating this style of communitas may seem to be,
disintermediation may be an ominous step toward enactment of
the mass-society scenario, insofar as it may involve the weakening
of representative and grass-roots institutions. 38
The process not only eliminates those intermediate layers of representation
but it also reduces the role of journalism itself as reporters
face the choice of either becoming partisan storytellers (was the
President guilty or not?) or interpretive experts, in this instance on
the strategies and processes that would or would not lead to a