The right and the left in America don’t agree on much, but for decades, they’ve shared one basic belief: You can’t trust the mainstream media. On the left, it was the New York Times and the big TV networks beating the drums about weapons of mass destruction and leading us in to the Iraq War. Or it was the corporate control of the major media, and the consolidation of ownership. Or it was Rupert Murdoch.

On the right, it was, of course, the famous “liberal media.” And for those who came of age with the blogosphere, it was the hated “gatekeepers”, those elite, arrogant editors who controlled what made it onto the front pages – and more important, what didn’t.

I’m one of those critics, too. As the executive editor of an alternative newspaper, I spend a lot of time talking about how the daily papers and the TV stations do a lousy job covering local news. I deplore the inaccuracy and bias of my local daily; I denounce the fluffy and superficial news broadcasts that ignore the real issues. I tease my town’s gatekeepers mercilessly; you think that crap is news? Why won’t you cover the real stories?

But a funny thing is happening in 2010: As corporate control of the news slackens, and the gatekeepers become less relevant, and media becomes so hyper-democratized that any fool with a $300 computer can become a publisher, some of us are starting to miss the old days.

You see, the media world has become so wide open that Americans are choking on information – and so much of it is either so utterly biased or factually inaccurate that nobody really knows who or what to believe any more.

photo by Alison Wright

The Shirley Sherrod affair made that point with such stunning clarity that it surprised political observers across the spectrum. Sherrod, a midlevel Department of Agriculture employee, became the latest victim of Andrew Breitbart, the blogger and online publisher whose fabricated and altered videos shattered an entire national organization.

In this case, Breitbart posted a heavily edited video of a speech Sherrod made to the NAACP. The excerpts made Sherrod look a racist who didn’t like white people — which corresponded precisely with the political narrative Breitbart was pushing.

Of course, sleazy political activists have tried to accuse their foes of all sorts of things over the years; the most insane, inaccurate stuff doesn’t typically stick. But this time around, a combination of new media technology, a split-second 24-hour news cycle and the willingness of agenda-driven talk radio to pick up on the smelliest scraps of gossip created a perfect political typhoon. Sherrod was fired, the Obama administration looked awful — and Breitbart, completely unrepentant, basked in the glory of celebrity and his soaring page views.

The sordid episode led Van Jones — a certified liberal activist and a member of the progressive political movement that has consistently blasted the mainstream media — to make an extraordinary confession: He misses Walter Cronkite. In a New York Times oped piece July 25th, Jones wrote:

“Anyone with a laptop and a flip camera can engineer a fake info-virus and inject it into the body politic. Those with cable TV shows and axes to grind can concoct their own realities. The high standards and wise judgments of people like Walter Cronkite once acted as our national immune system, zapping scandal-mongers and quashing wild rumors. As a step toward further democratizing America, we shrunk those old gatekeepers — and ended up weakening democracy’s defenses.”

This can’t go on forever. In a country as large and diverse as the United States, democracy can’t survive without honest reporters providing honest information that has some degree of credibility. At some point, the electronic media world will shake out — the Breitbarts of the world will become the equivalent of the Weekly World News, jabbering about space aliens and Elvis Presley’s clone. The more responsible outlets — the ones that have standards and principles — will become the accepted sources of reliable news that Cronkite and CBS once were.

The good news is that there will be more of them, and they’ll offer a broader spectrum of debate. The bad news is that we’re going to face a rough interregnum — a period when the old media have lost their credibility and are on the brink of collapse, and there’s so much new information slamming into our minds unfiltered and unedited that nobody knows if we can believe anything anyone says anymore.

And for anyone who really wants to make American politics work, that’s not a pleasant thought.

Tim Redmond is executive editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He has won more than 30 journalism awards, including the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Editorial Writing. He is the First Amendment chair of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

photos by Joel Sartore

Editorial Series Stephen Alvarez

photos by Stephen Alvarez

photo by Ira Block

A child takes a crayon from a box and scribbles a yellow circle in the corner of a sheet of paper: this is the sun. She takes another crayon and draws a green squiggle through the center of the page: this is the horizon. Cutting through the horizon she draws two brown lines that come together in a jagged peak: this is a mountain. Next to the mountain, she draws a lopsided black rectangle topped by a red triangle: this is her house. The child gets older, goes to school, and in her classroom she traces on a page, from memory, an outline of the shape of her country. She divides it, roughly, into a set of shapes that represent the states. And inside one of the states she draws a five-pointed star to mark the town she lives in. The child grows up. She trains to be a surveyor. She buys a set of fine instruments and uses them to measure the boundaries and contours of a property. With the information, she draws a precise plot of the land, which is then made into a blueprint for others to use.

photo by Stephen Alverez

Our intellectual maturation as individuals can be traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings. We begin with primitive, literal renderings of the features of the land we see around us, and we advance to ever more accurate, and more abstract, representations of geographic and topographic space. We progress, in other words, from drawing what we see to drawing what we know. Vincent Virga, an expert on cartography affiliated with the Library of Congress, has observed that the stages in the development of our mapmaking skills closely parallel the general stages of childhood cognitive development delineated by the twentieth-century Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. We progress from the infant’s egocentric, purely sensory perception of the world to the young adult’s more abstract and objective analysis of experience.

“First,” writes Virga, in describing how children’s drawings of maps advance, “perceptions and representational abilities are not matched; only the simplest topographical relationships are presented, without regard for perspective or distances. Then an intellectual ‘realism’ evolves, one that depicts everything known with burgeoning proportional relationships. And finally, a visual ‘realism’ appears, [employing] scientific calculations to achieve it.”

As we go through this process of intellectual maturation, we are also acting out the entire history of mapmaking. Mankind’s first maps, scratched in the dirt with a stick or carved into a stone with another stone, were as rudimentary as the scribbles of toddlers. Eventually the drawings became more realistic, outlining the actual proportions of a space, a space that often extended well beyond what could be seen with the eye. As more time passed, the realism became scientific in both its precision and its abstraction. The mapmaker began to use sophisticated tools like the direction-finding compass and the angle-measuring and to rely on mathematical reckonings and formulas. Eventually, in a further intellectual leap, maps came to be used not only to represent vast regions of the earth or heavens in minute detail, but to express ideas—a plan of battle, an analysis of the spread of an epidemic, a forecast of population growth.

photo by Jim Richardson

The historical advances in cartography didn’t simply mirror the development of the human mind. They helped propel and guide the very intellectual advances that they documented. The map is a medium that not only stores and transmits information but also embodies a particular mode of seeing and thinking. As mapmaking progressed, the spread of maps also disseminated the mapmaker’s distinctive way of perceiving and making sense of the world. The more frequently and intensively people used maps, the more their minds came to understand reality in the maps’ terms.

The influence of maps went far beyond their practical employment in establishing property boundaries and charting routes. “The use of a reduced, substitute space for that of reality,” explains the cartographic historian Arthur Robinson, “is an impressive act in itself.” But what’s even more impressive is how the map “advanced the evolution of abstract thinking” throughout society. “The combination of the reduction of reality and the construct of an analogical space is an attainment in abstract thinking of a very high order indeed,” writes Robinson, “for it enables one to discover structures that would remain unknown if not mapped.” The technology of the map gave to man a new and more comprehending mind, better able to understand the unseen forces that shape his surroundings and his existence.

Copyright 2010 by Nicholas Carr. Reprinted with permission of W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.

National Geographic photographers have a reputation for authentic images. But in the digital age what you see through the viewfinder is not always what you get in the edit. It is one of the challenges of contemporary nature photography. There is a fine balance between vision, reality and good visual storytelling. In Josh Anon’s new book he presents the tools to enhance your images and leaves it to the reader to make their own determination how to use them. The book reads like you’re having a coffee with a patient Photoshop expert who truly cares that you learn the craft.

Josh Anon works on the creative side at Pixar in Northern California. The work ethic that goes into Pixar’s Oscar winning movies is reflected in his book. His attention to subtle details will motivate you to run out and capture new images and then try your hand at some of Mr. Anon’s techniques.

National Geographic Blog recently got a chance to talk with Josh Anon about his new book, Photoshop CS5 for Nature Photographers, which explores the different techniques that allow digital technology and nature photography to co-exist in a non-compromising way.

NGA Blog:
In your book there is an undertone of remaining true to the image as it was shot.  Yet, you’re telling people how to use photo manipulation software.  How do you keep the balance in your minds eye?

Josh Anon:
What you see when you take the shot isn’t always what your camera captures, even if what you see is the potential that a shot has.  We’re not talking putting polar bears and penguins together but rather things like, “gee, this would be better if that branch wasn’t there, but I don’t/can’t disturb the scene” and “man, I wish I had time to wait around to get a better sky here.”  While you could use these techniques to put polar bears and penguins together, we leave it up to the reader to determine how much manipulation they want to tolerate and simply teach a range of techniques to improve their images.

NGA Blog:
When you’re shooting on location do you ever consider the post production power you have available back at home when you’re looking through the lens?  That is to say, do you ever shoot with the intent of working the image in photoshop?

Josh Anon:
Somewhat, and it’s a new tool that digital photographers have.  HDR, panoramas, and other techniques that involve multiple images are mainly where I think about post-production, allowing me to capture shots you couldn’t do on film.  However, I aim to get the shot as perfect as possible and find it much easier to walk to get the composition I want rather than planning on relying on Photoshop.