Michael S. Kochin published this essay in Rhêtorikê: Revista Digital de Retórica 0 (March 2008):
First, newspapers and television don’t have footnotes. Even newspaper science reporting and editorials, both of which almost always rely on other reporting, do not use footnotes to direct us to that reporting [while] political blogs are rich in hyperlinks, the internet equivalent of footnotes.
…online newspapers, the Guardian in England or Ha’aretz in Israel, frequently provide links for further information. Such links are not generally source links but exit links: I cannot recall a single instance in which the link was to the specific sources for the factual claims in the article2. So my second observation is that blogs, and in particular public affairs blogs, have footnotes, that is to say, they source their claims through hyperlinks…
Third observation: public affairs blogs and online communities of other sorts have already played crucial roles in politics in the United States….
As Walter Lippmann puts it[,] “a code of right and wrong must wait upon a perception of the true and the false.” Insofar as political institutions see truth or correctness, they are largely engaged in sifting claims of fact rather then assessing arguments. As Lippmann writes, “useful discussion … instead of comparing ideals, re-examines visions of the facts.”
Some examples: what mattered in the period immediately before the second Gulf War was whether Saddam Hussein had chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. What matters is what are the expected net costs of global warming…
Persuasion, then, is largely a matter of getting one’s claims of fact seen as true and relevant… To quote Walter Lippmann again, “Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot choose between true and false accounts. So we choose between trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters.”
…When do we resort to argument? Real speeches heavy on arguments seem to aim to present the speaker as calm, serious, and knowledgeable. In public life, one argues not in order to demonstrate the claim for which one is arguing, but firstly, to show that one possesses homonoia, that one shares the common prejudices or values that appear in the presuppositions and conclusions of one’s argument, or, secondly, to demonstrate phronesis, to show mastery of the subject matter by displaying relevant knowledge in coherently organized detail. Arguing is thus a way of presenting facts and principles so as to show one’s character as worthy of trust.
To be trusted is to be trusted as a knowledgeable, unbiased source of relevant facts. “Trust me” is a comparatively rare appeal.
Thus we need guidance on the ocean of facts. This point was explored at length after the First World War by Walter Lippmann, and his set of solutions was institutionalized into the American policy Establishment. This establishment rests on three components: first, think-tanks and government research bureaus; second, objective reporting in newspapers
and broadcast media; third, editorialists in that media who draw out the consequences of what is reported for their readers and instruct them which politicians or issues ought to be supported…What we can see now about the Lippmannite establishment is that the primary mediation is institutional. Not the official who wrote or complied it, but the bureau or think tank stands behind the report. Not the reporter, but the newspaper, wire service, or television network stands behind his or her reportage. In that respect the Lippmannite establishment is quite different from the academic and scientific establishments. In the case of “the media,” it is made as difficult as possible for the viewer, reader, or consumer to get behind the institution to the sources. The print reporter “protects his sources. ”The television news network sequesters the raw footage from which the broadcast report is cut and edited. The wire editor for the local paper edits down the wire report without even an ellipsis mark to note what has been deleted. We, the consumer of these mediated reports, have no choice but to rely on the institutional reputation of the newspaper or television network that the factual claims in the report as presented are correct and representative.
…Small countries like Israel have disproportionately large establishments, simply because of the inverse of economies of scale. After all, it takes a certain number of people to run an establishment, and those are going to be a higher proportion of the well-informed and hyperliterate in a smaller country. To present facts other people have not considered is to threaten the way things are going on. Faced with these facts the established elite has a conflict of interest: on the one hand that elite needs correct facts
in order to go on, and on the other hand they cannot go on pursuing their projects if these projects are perpetually being called into question.…New facts that threaten our picture changes the action by a kind of backwards induction, since we cannot carry out the action if we cannot hold to the picture that rationalizes them. The Establishment media of the Lippmannite era, say 1919-1999, engaged in a kind of gatekeeping of facts that allowed policy Establishments to maintain solidarity and the integrity of their projects.
Now conformity to established opinion is always and everywhere the price of being or remaining within the Establishment. Yet simply by the numbers small countries have less room for a counter-establishment which presents facts uncongenial to the establishment, or for any kind of informed opinion outside the establishment. In the United States so many people are excluded from the policy establishment by sheer force of numbers, that any hyperliterate person interested in public affairs can find a job as an academic, reporter, or think-tank researcher.
In small countries it is more-or-less impossible to have influence on the course of affairs from outside the establishment, given the higher relative reward to anyone who might pay attention to ignore you and keep in good with “The Powers that Be.” In Israel, disagreeing with the mainstream of elite opinion guarantees that one will have no influence, and unless one is fortunate to have landed an academic position, no income.
…In small countries, or at least in Israel, there is less room for counterestablishment mediators, largely because there are fewer hyperliterate people to do the job. In Israel there are no influential political blogs, and there is no influential nationalist media outlet, no Israeli right-wing equivalent to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. The Israeli media still speaks truth to power, but it speaks only those truths with which the established media is comfortable. Nobody in Israel is speaking truth to the established “old” media after the fashion of the pro-Bush bloggers in the Rathergate scandal.
Smallness, I conclude, has a perverse consequence for foreign policy. The Taoist strategy manual “The Master of Demon Valley” teaches “To be small means there is no inside; to be large means there is no outside.” This has two consequences: First, small countries have no inside: their affairs are more determined by what goes on outside of them than are those of big countries. Second, small countries have no inside: they don’t have inside of them a counterestablishment, including public affairs blogs, that can present uncomfortable facts about the challenges coming from outside.
I am always astonished by how much better Americans understand Israel than Israelis understand America, even though Israeli national survival depends, in great part, on a successful understanding of America. Small countries, having no inside, have a greater need to be guided by accurate information about what is outside, but in fact they have less accurate information about what is outside. We need to keep in mind Cass Sunstein’s observation that “blunders are significantly increased if people are rewarded not for correct decisions but for decisions that conform to the decisions made by most people”. Establishments may sometimes heed mavericks, but they never reward them.
