Conservativa

In a Wall Street Journal column of March 27, 2008, Daniel Henninger addresses recent examples of surrogates in Presidential campaigns saying things that the campaigns dare not say. (For instance, Samantha Power calling Hillary “a monster”). Then he says, “The problem for the campaigns, and this is new to our politics, is that these incidents… will never go away. Once they enter the bitstreams of the Internet, they circulate without end — on blogs, on political talk shows, in print.” He says that the availability of material on the Internet can be “a kind of never-ending truth loop” and “a useful brake on the compulsive excesses and artifice of politicians.” That was all well said.

But then for the closing of the column Henninger refers to the TV show “The Prisoner,” in which a former spy is kept in a pleasant yet sinister Village, presumably by the agency from which he just resigned without saying why. When the Prisoner, Number 6, tries to escape, he is subdued by a giant white balloon, and dragged back to the Village, where he is watched, 24/7. He says, “the constant, omniscient and unforgiving fastidiousness of the Web-led media is beginning to make one feel like a character in the famous British sci-fi TV series ‘The Prisoner.’” Henninger concludes his column with, “The Web is becoming our white balloon.”

In the incidents he lists (Powers and others) the people being watched are the politicians and their surrogates. Then why does Henninger cast himself as Number 6? (Or at least he feels much sympathy for the one being scrutinized). In a game of Watcher and Watched, isn’t the columnist, being a journalist, one of the Watchers, along with the bloggers and YouTubers? Then why the identification with Number 6?

Is it possible that Henninger is uncomfortable because, with the emergence of the blogs, etc. the information flow is no longer completely in the hands of the professionals in his guild? If so, then perhaps he and his fellow professionals should ask why we non-professionals do our blogging and YouTube-ing with such zest? Could it be that we feel that we have not always been well-served by the professional class of journalists, especially now that its senior ranks are made up of people whose sensibilities were formed by, and have not changed since, the 1960’s? And, by the way, how are those circulation and ad revenue numbers looking?

When the Prisoner finds himself in the Village, he quickly finds that all of the rules for living have changed. He can’t get a straight answer on the new rules. The Internet is like that - the rules are more fluid than set in place. Perhaps this is another reason why Henninger finds himself in sympathy with Number 6.

And perhaps this is true: the Internet can also be “a useful brake on the compulsive excesses and artifice” …of journalists. Maybe that is the giant white balloon bubbling beneath the surface of this odd analogy, threatening to bring its large featureless menace to the surface.