How The Times Bested The Daily Show (A Contrarian View)

As my colleague Cathy Taylor notes, correspondent Jason Jones got the best of Executive Editor Bill Keller with his rendition of the old "black and white and red all over" word joke, but as I review the tape, I believe that Keller made a valid point of his own.

"The last time I was in Baghdad I didn't see a Huffington Post bureau or a Google bureau or a Drudge Report bureau," Keller stated. And then, he lodged his own shot over the bow: "It's a lot easier to stay home and riff on the work that somebody else does."

He got that one right. There isn't much original work of merit at the HuffPost or on Drudge. Most of what makes headlines on those sites is either rumor or refried news, first cooked up by somebody else. To her credit, Arianna Huffington has set up an investigative reporting project that may eventually make some serious contributions of merit.

Google, by contrast, contributes absolutely nothing of value to the business of creating original news content because it refuses to hire any human beings for that purpose. From this perspective, it is simply a neutral filter, adding little beyond aggregation and links to the media industry.

Although here at Bnet and elsewhere I've been as derisive as anyone covering the newspaper companies like The Times, my criticism has been based on their performances as businesses. I don't like what I see in their filings to the SEC, indicating huge debt loads due to unwise acquisitions, backward-thinking revenue plans too hitched to advertising models that have evolved beyond them, and a lack of investment in technologies that promise to extend media into the new channels of the future.

I also believe newspapers as currently produced carry too large a carbon footprint, so from an environmental perspective, they've got to go.

All of this, however, does not mean I have any beef with the editors and reporters. In fact, I respect them enormously, and I agree fully with Keller's point. Any wimp can sit at a keyboard and launch word missiles at The Times. But it takes a hell of a lot more courage to report from a war zone, where the missiles pointed your way carry far more punch than do mere words, as you try to sort out the facts for the folks back home.

We lose journalists to bombs, kidnappings and jailings every month. The two young reporters for Current TV, recently sentenced to 12 years of hard labor by the heinously oppressive regime in North Korea, for "entering the country illegally," is a case in point.

Furthermore, a business like a newspaper is not strictly about maximizing profits for its shareholders, as un-American as that may sound to purists. There are indeed other social values at work here that have to do with keeping large centers of power (governments, big corporations and unions) accountable; and keeping communities well-informed and aware of ways to improve our collective possibilities in the future.

So, maybe I'm just feeling contrarian today, but while Cathy has awarded the match to The Daily Show, which will most definitely be the consensus in online circles, I'm going to say it was the grey old lady, via Keller's joust, that scored the main hit and therefore won the day.

Besides, where would The Daily Show, the HuffPost, Drudge, and Google be without content creators like The Times (whether you agree with its editorial pespective or not)? Nowhere, that's where. The truth is The Times is good for everyone else's bottom line, and they all (privately) know it.