Davos Newbies

I’m just catching up with an avalanche of reading, postponed because of concentration on my start-up and summer indolence.

Best of the bunch so far is Orville Schell’s explanation on Jay Rosen’s PressThink of why a group of journalism schools have banded together to rethink what they do.

Speaking as someone who has studied China and other Marxist-Leninist states for the last 45 years, there are haunting similarities between the public relations apparatus of the current administration and the propaganda apparatus of Leninist political parties. They include ultra-loyalty and obedience to the supreme leader; extreme party discipline; an absolute imperative to stay on-message (fidelity to “the correct line�); maximizing the use of state organs for propaganda purposes; and a poorly evolved appreciation of the essential role that the Founding Fathers of this country imagined for the press as an independent watchdog over all kinds of power (whether state, ecclesiastical, corporate, etc.)

I am not saying that there is a comparison between our government and that of a Leninist state like China, but I am saying that the role and acceptance by our state of the media as a legitimate and necessary institution is weaker now than ever before. I am also suggesting that because of their commercial/corporate backgrounds, when it comes to the question of “communications,� many in the higher reaches of government have a keener appreciation of public relations than of independent, hard-hitting and often abrasive investigative journalism. Their tendency is to want to use communications as “the mouthpiece� of the state and party, rather than to see the most important role for communications as one of opposition and challenge to established power centers.

This almost religious veneration of Woodward, Bernstein, Bradley, Graham means that people did, and still do, feel a deep need to believe that someone can, and will, stand up to these prevailing centers of power and propaganda. The Watergate hearings were cathartic, because sclerotic Washington did finally rise for one grand moment to dig in the Washington manure pile and get past the spin and PR to search out truth and fact from falsehood. And, yes, by now we have forgotten many of those other figures like Sen. Sam Ervin or Sam Dash who played such important parts in the saga. What we remember instead is their personifications.

Today’s Financial Times reports on its US front page that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp may spend $2 billion in a “drive to become dominant internet force”.

Leave aside that $2 billion doesn’t buy you very much in the way of Internet force (the same paper reports that Yahoo! will spend $1 billion for 40% of Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba). And you can view with appropriate scepticism Murdoch telling the FT that he is in “very advanced negotiations to buy a controlling interest in a wonderful search engine”.

The problem is that companies like News Corp have consistently shown themselves to be incapable of becoming part of the Internet. Murdoch did make a perceptive speech earlier this year, true, but that doesn’t change his character or the character of his company. News Corp is built on the principles of gatekeeper, we-are-the-authority media, a long distance from the two-way essence of the Internet. Their recent $580 million offer for Intermix Media, which owns MySpace.com shows to me how limited their ambitions will have to be. However much News Corp spends, I’m sure they won’t become a key company for the Internet.

There’s another puzzle about the FT article to me. Who on earth decided that this kind of speculative, puffy news story deserved to be one of only three on the front page? I hope the key editors are all safely in Tuscan villas this week, rather than making such baffling editorial decisions.