Ms. Dowd and the Dissonance Path
15th April 2009
Today, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times provides, ineluctably unaware of course, an illustration of a human on the dissonance path. She decries the predations of Google and Craigslist on journalism and worries about the impending loss of journalism as a check and balance. She wonders why Google doesn’t pay her for the content she provides to their search engine. She realizes that Google is already looking for her replacement. Through it all, she never considers the possibility that perhaps her own actions have contributed to the decline of journalism in general and of the New York Times in particular.
Thus, we have a human facing negative consequences, some of which must certainly be a direct function of her own prior decisions and actions. But, accepting responsibility for the sorry and declining state of journalism (general and particular) would cost an enormous amount of psychic pain. You would have to admit that “your” journalism is a failure and that the large scale, continuing, and unabated declines can be attributed to your flaws.
To avoid that responsibility (“I caused a failure”), Dowd demonstrates in her column the two most obvious coping mechanisms: External attributions and self-bolstering.
The external attributions are easy to spot: Google did it! and Craigslist helped! Echoing Eve from Genesis, Maureen Dowd explains these bad outcomes simply: The devil did it.
Lost from consideration, of course, is the many massive and obvious failures of journalism general and particular in the past 10 years. Looking only at her Times, one might also see the roots of failure in: the Jayson Blair scandal, the Judith Miller scandal, incompetent business practice from the family ownership, just for starters.
In the face of failure, Dowd engages in self-bolstering with the familiar assertion of “checks and balances” as if her job was described in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Dowd doesn’t write for the fame or the fortune, but rather to speak truth to power. She stands between us and tryanny, you know. She stood on the Pettus Bridge, caught John Dean redhanded, made Reagan confess Contra, found the blue dress, took the pictures at Abu Ghraib, and, . . . of course not.
And, she believes what she writes.
That’s what happens when you are on the dissonance path. And, as long as Dowd and apparently most other journalists, stay on that path, journalism cannot change, adapt, and improve, but merely maintain its status as a Buggy Whip Industry. (And even that metaphor should be updated to the Detroit Auto Industry – another illustration of folks trapped on the dissonance path.)
It’s not easy being a human.