New media: Good for democracy?

By Dusty Horwitt

Earlier this year, pundits and politicians were again buzzing about the apparent democratic power of the Internet when a supporter of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois posted a video on YouTube portraying rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York as an Orwellian dictator.

Take a close look at the Internet, however, and its democratic luster disappears like Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.

Let's begin with the ad about Senator Clinton. It was reported that the video had spread to television, where network and cable news shows had aired portions of it. The Washington Post reported that within days, it had been "viewed" online more than 2 million times. Two million views, however, does not mean 2 million people. "Views," "visits" and "visitors" are typically registered each time a person visits a Web site.

In a 2005 analysis of the top blogs among U.S. Internet users, comScore Media Metrix, a company that measures Internet traffic, found a large disparity between the number of "visits" the blogs received and the number of people, or "unique visitors," who accounted for those visits.

Over the first three months of 2005, for example, the liberal DailyKos.com attracted almost 3 million visits but only about 350,000 people - a little more than 0.1 percent of the U.S. population. ComScore noted that many of these unique visitors read the blogs infrequently, indicating that a large number of those views are likely by a fairly small number of people who visit the site often.

In June 2006, comScore data showed that of an estimated 30 million or more blogs, only about 70 reached an audience of 100,000 or more U.S. Internet users during that month. Of these 70, about 10 focused on noncelebrity news or politics. Their audience size ranged from 117,000 for LittleGreenFootballs.com to 1.4 million for Breitbart.com.

Why do these numbers matter? Because in a democracy, citizens who want to make a difference must be able to reach a broad audience. Only by winning a coalition of support can most people exercise political power. For example, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff write in their 2006 Pulitzer-winning book, The Race Beat, that broad media coverage was essential to the civil rights movement's success.

The problem with the Internet is that it buries citizens' voices under an avalanche of information.

"When you think about the amount of information that is published to the Web, it is a physical impossibility for the vast majority of that stuff to spread virally," said Derek Gordon, marketing director for Technorati, a firm that measures the popularity of blogs.

The larger problem is that the Internet siphons audiences and revenue from the media outlets that can give citizens a voice, causing them to shrink and further impairing the media's democratic power.

Of course, the Internet is hardly alone in this. An array of technologies fueled by inexpensive energy, including cable, satellites and DVDs, has in recent years helped to consolidate the media by overproducing information.

Much like farmers hurt by overproduction of food, media companies have been forced to give away their data for less while becoming more dependent on advertisers and expensive new technologies.

Ben H. Bagdikian has identified similar trends in his book The New Media Monopoly. Mr. Bagdikian notes that as late as 1970, when the U.S. had about 100 million fewer people than it does today, there were three newspapers in my hometown of Washington, D.C., with daily circulations of 200,000 to 500,000. The papers likely had even wider reach because of multiple readers per copy. Today, only one local paper has a circulation of 200,000 or more, and its readership and staff are dwindling.

Similarly, as late as 1980, the three network newscasts reached 25 percent to 50 percent of the population each night. In 2006, nightly newscasts on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX and MSNBC combined reached less than 10 percent. According to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, some newspapers have attracted additional readers online, but visits to newspaper Web sites tend to be very brief.

The conventional wisdom is that the media and the rest of us can make the transition to the digital world. But the evidence strongly suggests that the blizzard of online data makes such a transition - at least in a way that promotes democracy - impossible.