Follow-up to Cline's Analysis

Yesterday, Dr. Cline posted his analysis of The Echo Chamber interview with Jay Rosen.

He also posted a blog pointer to this site and gave an ECP plug in his latest podcast, which sent a spike of activity my way.

We had some good follow-up discussion about a number of points that Dr. Cline brought up. Dr. Cline is already starting to pick up some of the same themes after analyzing two interviews. He makes the following two claims:

Claim: The press experienced the emotion of inevitability in regard to the build-up to war because of its structural inability create a debate independent from civic institutions (e.g. Congress) and powerful civic actors (e.g. President Bush).

Claim: The television press is structurally incapable of relaying information about conflicts that do not arise in contentions between and among people.

I think he's spot on with the first claim, and he's on the right track with second claim -- except for I don't think that it's totally impossible for the TV press to accomplish this if they invested enough time and effort into it.

There's a lot more discussion in the comments section.