The only subject that attracted more media coverage than Boston last week was the media coverage of Boston. A media industry has grown around the media industry, like a system of surveillance cameras for a reality television show. “Media watchdog” now might mean a media group tasked with watching itself!
In a world after Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, news is simultaneously produced and distributed on semi-interconnected channels. News is generated by traditional media corporations and shared across social media, even as social media generates its own news content and circulates conventional media products. The complicated exchange of information between corporate media entities and social media users creates its own searchable and durable archive, which in turn becomes the subject of redistribution through corporate and social media networks. Thus it has become easier for the media to conduct investigative journalism on itself, to report on its own practices, and to discipline itself. But is meta-muckraking healthy? Does it lead to real reforms or improvements in the ethics and efficiency of news journalism?
Meta-muckraking claims to cure a spiral away from “good” journalistic practices, or the rules that governed “how to write a news lead” circa 1950: get the facts right and get the factsright: be ethical and be accurate. According to its advocates, meta-muckraking exposes sleazy and reckless reporting habits—both on social media platforms and in news articles proper—and boosts the quality of journalism on the web. Public shaming is a first-resort, and its immediate effect is to transform the media industry into a spectacle.
Self-spectatorship reflects a narcissism buried deep in the heart of digital journalism, a desire to listen forever to one’s own voice. Yet meta-muckraking might reveal that pathology to itself. The patient, by conducting an auto-analysis, can diagnose its own ills. Is meta-muckraking a symptom of a disease that, in the moment of becoming-symptomatic, heals itself? Media coverage of the Boston attacks would suggest otherwise. With every passing tragedy, and there seems to have been an undue concentration this year, meta-muckraking increases in intensity. And with every passing tragedy, unethical and inaccurate reportage seems to increase, too. Either meta-muckraking is getting better at finding worst practices at work, or meta-muckraking is damaging the very institutional standards it intends to protect.