April 18, 2006
DISPARATE PARTICULARISM:
The Future of Journalism as Told by Hilaire Belloc in 1918: "The Free Press," by Hilaire Belloc, describes, with some adjustment, the evolving relationship between political bloggers and the mainstream media. (VERLYN KLINKENBORG, 4/18/06, NY Times)
"The Free Press" is an extended essay examining the history of what Belloc calls the "Official Press" in England and the emergence of a rival "Free Press" in the form of small, often short-lived journals.The Official Press, Belloc argues, is centralized and Capitalist (he always capitalizes Capitalist), and its owners are "the true governing power in the political machinery of the State, superior to the officials in the State, nominating ministers and dismissing them, imposing policies, and, in general, usurping sovereignty — all this secretly and without responsibility." The result "is that the mass of Englishmen have ceased to obtain, or even to expect, information upon the way they are governed." [...]
The free press that Belloc describes was a horde of small, highly opinionated, sometimes propagandistic papers that arose in reaction to "the official Press of Capitalism." What characterized the free press, Belloc wrote, was "disparate particularism."
As he says, "the Free Press gives you the truth; but only in disjointed sections, for it is disparate and it is particularist." (For "particularism," Belloc offers the synonym "crankiness.") To get at the truth by reading the organs of the free press, you have to "add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated statement against another." But his point is that you can get at the truth.
There are whole paragraphs in Belloc's essay where, if you substitute "blogs" for "the Free Press," you will be struck by the parallels.
First cancel out all the pretense that Eric and Julia Roberts are different people.
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 18, 2006 7:34 AM