Antitrust!

Already not doing a good job of the consistent posting. Anyway…

I’m so upset that the NY Times has taken over the Freakonomics blog!

Sure, it’s great publicity for Levitt, Dubner and company, but they had such a cute and individualistic web space on their own. What was wrong with just mentioning the old site in the extremely exhaustive blog roll that the Times already touts?

There’s been much commentary on news conglomerates lately what with Mr. Murdoch’s acquisition of the WSJ. While I’m not one to have the knee-jerk reaction of “He’s going to turn the paper into the briefcase-friendly arm of Fox News”, I still find the merger and white-knight business disturbing when it has such profound effects on our news culture. Some time ago, I posted a link to a column where the author pondered whether it’s possible to reconcile business with journalistic integrity, and whether standards today are any lower than they were forty years ago. This particular writer concluded that the landscape is much the same as it used to be in terms of news content, despite transformations in the ways in which we receive our information. The gap between big business and quality journalism, however, was reduced to something of a myth due to snobbishness on the part of the press.

Is it, though? Maybe I have a rose-coloured view of American journalistic history as a child of immigrants who, in their youth, greatly admired the freedom of the American press. This is, of course, in comparison to a post-partition South Asian society struggling with the challenges of newfound independence. Still, allowing business principles to overwhelm our journalism just seems like bad news (please excuse the pun), and this time it’s not an issue of economic monopolization – though you could certainly make that case as well.

Instead, the important issue should be encouraging outlets for free thought through journalistic integrity, and trend of news conglomerates could significantly undermine that. I don’t think the Sulzbergers are necessarily poring over every line of Freakonomics looking to strike anything that they find disagreeable, but my fear is that the American news landscape will ultimately begin to mimic its political landscape: two giants, both polarizing, neither of which captures the whole story. They may change their slogans to adapt to the times, but at the end of the day, we are forced to choose one side or the other.

What can be done to make the mold more malleable, I wonder?