RIP Mike Wallace – And Not A Moment Too Soon

CBS newsman Mike Wallace died this week at the age of 93.

The airwaves and much of the blogosphere was filled with eulogies extolling his greatness as a ‘journalist’.

I beg to differ.

Wallace was certainly great in that ‘old school’ kind of TV journalism and he had a great on air presence.  But I think he was representative of a kind of journalism that will soon be gone.  The ‘official’ expert.  The ‘voice of God’.

I am a graduate of the J school at Columbia University (class of ’83). My classmates still communicate with each other on the listserve.  After Wallace’s death, a few posted their memories of working with him.  One, a former producer with CBS News posted the following as part of a very long piece:

“I’d always marvel when he’d show up to an interview having barely even talked about it, and sit down cold and ask better questions, without hesitation or thinking, than I’d written for him in my briefing book after weeks of work. He’d often barely read or just skim what we producers prepared for him. But he still could just sit down and do it better than anyone I ever worked with…

That was, I am sure, meant as praise, but to me it drove home all the reasons I left my producer job at CBS News in 1988, and why I would say good riddance to the whole ‘Reporter As TV Star’ system.

-Barely talked about the subject
-Didn’t read a thing
-Didn’t bother with the research
-Pretty much faked his way through the interviews.

And THIS is the pinnacle of television journalism?

Great.

Well, it’s really no surpise in a world in which Peter Jennings, a 10th grade dropout used to be advertised on the sides of bus stops with the logo: Look At The world With More Intelligence.

Sure, Peter Jennings looked great, even if everything he said was written by his three writers: Schulder, Blatt and Stein.  They did not appear on TV, I suppose, because they didn’t look so great.

But I digress….

The world of television journalism natrually lent itself to this ‘performer’ mode of journalism.  “Hey, look at me. Over here. I’ve got the news for you!’

As broadcast journalism migrates to the web, it tends to take that model with it.  Now you can watch Matt Lauer on TV or your phone if you want to.  “Hey, look at me. I am on your phone!”

But the web is not broadcasting. The web is about communities. The web is participatory.  It is different.  And when it comes to journalism, it should be different too. But it isn’t.. yet.

When new technologies arrive, they tend to be jammed into old ways of working.  The web is no exception. Even though the web does all kinds of amazing things, if you go to NYTimes.com you get… a newspaper. Admittedly it is on line, but it is a newspaper.  If you go to NBC or ABC or CBS online, you get the same thing. You get to ‘watch’ TV.

Big deal.

If journalism is the pursuit of the truth, then the web presents a great opportunity to rethink journalism.  I mean, completely rethink it.

In 1906, Sir Francis Galton was visiting a local fair in England.  The village was having a competition. Villagers were asked to guess the weight of an ox after it had been slaughtered and dressed.  More than 800 villagers participated in the contest, but no one got the right answer, which was 1,198 lbs. However, the mean average of all the guesses came in at 1,197 lbs.  That is less than .1% off.  Extremely accurate.

This is what we refer to as the collective wisdom of crowds.  Galton had discovered what makes democracy so powerful.  No one person can really know the truth, but the average of many opinions will generally take you there.

The same wisdom, which several hundred years ago we applied to government when Parliaments and elections replaced ‘the wisdom of Kings’, can now be applid to journalims as well.

It is highly unlikely that Mike Wallace or Matt Lauer or Peter Jennings or anyone else for that matter knows much about anything much.  Even with their support staffs of producers and writers and makeup people.  You don’t get much.

But take the Galton model and turn it on to journalims and you get something pretty interesting.  Crowd sourced journalism.

Scary?

You bet.

But plenty of people found the idea of ‘democracy’ scary as well – a lot still do. Just ask the Assad family or the Al Sabah’s in Kuwait or the Chinese Politburo.  But it does work.

And it could work in journalism.  A kind of giant global wiki, constantly edited, constantly updated.

But to make it work we have to get rid of our Matt Lauers and our Ann Currys….

Hmmm….

So RIP Mike Wallace, and hopefully the whole system that you represented.