David Brooks, in his Times column today (emphasis added):
When I started covering presidential primaries, the best part was getting to know the candidates. We journalists would ride around in vans and buses with them and get an intimate look at what it’s like to endure this soul-destroying process. But the ubiquity of Web cams and tweets has ended that off-the-record culture. As the technology gets more open, the lines of political communications become more closed.
True enough, and I’m surprised that more people don’t consider this paradox. On the other hand, our silicon revolution has also led to Rupert Murdoch tweeting directly to the public:
I sense we are only at the very beginning of a long battle between access and information.
and 
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The irony of Murdoch posting that on Twitter, a site which, if the law he was talking about was passed, would have to screen every post from every users for its copyright appropriateness.
Twitter should delete his account for that posting.
I want to see the tech companies start to play hardball on this. SOPA/PIPA threaten the very fabric of the internet.
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This has also been posited as a plausible theory explaining the partisanship in Washington. In the past, Democrats and Republicans, once in Washington, were free to fraternize and form personal relationships that made reaching common ground easier. Technology has removed that veil of hidden fraternity, and while that might at first seem to be a good thing in that representatives are more “accountable” to their constituencies, it also is an acid that eats away at the stuff that productive compromise is made of…
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Can someone explain to Mr. Murdoch how economics works? I think the earlier post ( http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/how-much-do-music-and-movie-piracy-really-hurt-the-u-s-economy/ ) on this blog is a great place to start.
It’s weird to see such a wealthy, powerful man deigning to use that kind of vitriol while in the midst of trying to push through a huge bill.
Don’t forget that at his core Rupert Murdoch is just a old timey newspaperman. For all his billions all he cares about are his newspapers, right or wrong, obsolete or not obsolete, its just his thing. It you look at the recent phone hacking scandal in the UK, that country’s entire political class is basically at the mercy of their out of control newspapers, so there is still something to his newspapers=power attitude.
Anyway, almost nowhere else has the internet so thoroughly decimated an industry as in newspapers. Not only was the raison d’etre of the internet to do exactly what newspapers did, only better, it makes it trivial for the average person to completely bypass the the old ways papers would extract revenue. You think downloading MP3′s is easy, a newspaper’s daily content would fit in about 1/10th the space which is small enough for even the dial-up crowd.
Murdoch is just plain bitter. He wants the days where a newspaper meant a mon or duopoly in a given market and it was impossible to “steal” the content without a firearm. He’s mad that if he doesn’t let Google search his articles then all the traffic will go to Joe Blogger News, but when he does he doesn’t get paid for it. He’s doubled down on being a newspaper baron when, like buggy whips, that’s not the way one can feasibly amass power anymore.
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Maybe I’m wrong, but to me it *feels* like the respect for off-the-record journalism has declined. W all the competition in news, journalist are more cut-throat than in years past. The need to report on the news to obtain ratings has crowded out the underlying respect news sources used to have on what the public *should* know about.
For instance, did the public *need* to know about JFK’s affairs? I don’t think so. It was understood he had a very important job to do and his personal life wasn’t to be touched. I don’t think we live in that kind of society anymore.
i call ghost writer for murdoch’s tweets- sounds like it may be sarah palin?
I may have sent a snarky response to Mr. Murdoch for that tweet.
That’ll show him.
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It seems to me like what has really gone by the wayside is analysis by journalists. Mr. Brooks and his colleagues at PBS still do this, but most people are watching trashier news programs. Take Murdoch’s tweet as an example – I wonder if CNN has spent more time explaining SOPA or reading out loud Murdoch’s tweet and then providing a statistical review of the number of retweets and responses that it received. They seem to assume that we (the tweeting public) already know everything, and we just need to hear how many other people think like us.
Perhaps Mr. Brooks would argue that actual analysis requires some level of inside access and off-the record discussion. I am not sure why that has to be true.
If we look at local politics, without the 24-7 access, etc., I think we will still find journalists doing shoddy work and focusing more on selling than on reporting. This is more a problem with the business of journalism than it is a problem of access.
I agree that we’re in a battle between access and information; however, much of it seems to be disinformation: Murdoch’s tweet as exhibit one. Using technology and media to get out a message opens the message to all forms of, for lack of a better word, lying. Spin, message control, access control, all serve to limit rather than encourage open exchange of ideas. And the news, all they seem to do any more is present the controversy, not the truth behind the positions. Even NPR, the last bastion of relatively good coverage, has devolved to a he-said-she-said pseudo-reporting that emphasizes the controversy over the truth. We have access and data, information seems to be in very short supply.