Oxford don and cyberspace

OXFORD, England--Anyone with a reverence for education attends Oxford Round Table discussions with a sense of awe. Oxford University has been a center of learning since the 13th century.
And speaking of learning, it is apparent that British professors know more about everything than their U.S. counterparts here to attend a conference on “Education and Cyberspace Law.”
Richard Tur, an Oxford don who gave the welcoming speech, regaled conferees at a reception before dinner. He quoted yards of Bobbie Burns, complete with Scots burr and dialect, spoke easily of British history (Cromwell), British writers (Orwell) and the U.S. Supreme Court (Justices Blackmun and Kennedy).
The sessions themselves were uneven, some as dull as faculty meetings. Many revealed the mustiness of the academy with talk titles such as “Stratospheric Transparency,” “Collaborative Enforcement Model” and “Disaggregated Informational Ownership.”
One professor’s talk was disjointed. Other speakers, while quite scholarly, were long-winded. One speaker offered a 37-page tome. One paper had 142 footnotes.
Another speaker declared that digital technology had “enriched lives in countless ways.” It’s a dubious proposition. Maybe that’s why the speaker gave no examples of alleged enrichment.
The conferees seemed to forget the purpose of higher education: knowledge, understanding and wisdom. As Francis Bacon said: “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” Studying and using the essential tools of digitology is not higher education.
The conferees did made it clear that the Internet means all privacy is gone, that Web censorship is almost impossible and that the law is slow to catch up with ever-changing technology.
On the third day of the Round Table sparks began to fly. Why? Speakers talked about issues and ideas that had nothing to do with cyberspace.
Nancy Heitzeg, sociology professor at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minn., urged the end of mandatory prison sentences, pleaded for abolition of the death penalty and espoused the legalization of drugs.
Sammy van Hoose of Wayland Baptist University in Texas, leading a discussion on the place of religion in schools, expressed a strong belief in God while holding to the rigid separation of church and state.
But I felt compelled to issue an apologia for atheism, noting that atheists like Emma Goldman and Eugene “Little Jesus” Debs were more Christian than most Christians. (Shelley was kicked out of Oxford in 1811 for writing an essay called “The Necessity of Atheism.”)
In my talk I lamented the decline of newspapers. But I pointed out that the falloff will hardly be arrested when papers like the San Francisco Chronicle dump outstanding liberal columnists E.J. Dionne and Robert Scheer and mordant essayist Mark Morford.
While the demise of newspapers would be unfortunate, it would hardly be the tragedy many media observers call it. Those sky-is-falling commentariats see a diminished democracy, darkened “sectors of our life” and a terrible “threat to self-government and the rule of law.”
Utter nonsense. Alexander Cockburn, Nation columnist, calls it hardly tragic if the corporate press perishes. “By and large the mainstream newspapers have obstructed efforts to improve our social and political condition.”
I ask my journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno, whether the media are liberal or conservative. Most of them answer liberal.
Why? Well, they complain that the media are always harping on abortion, urging gay marriage or demanding the end of the military policy of don’t ask-don’t tell. My answer: it depends on where you stand politically. To me, a Man of the Left, the media are conservative.
The litany is old and long. I.F. Stone, the great American radical journalist, was blacklisted by the media after he had the temerity to urge national health insurance on “Meet the Press” as long ago as 1949.
Noam Chomsky, leftist and media critic, is persona non grata in mainstream newspapers today. No Establishment newspaper carries a socialist columnist. The Holmesian marketplace of ideas in the media extends no farther left than liberalism.
Totalitarian nations have overt censorship. America has subtle censorship, a self-censorship that bows to power and protects the conservative status quo. Newspapers have so often betrayed the First Amendment, the most glorious thing about America.
As Amy and David Goodman write in their book, “The Exception to the Rulers”: “This is not a media that is serving a democratic society. This is a well-oiled propaganda machine that is repackaging government spin and passing it off as journalism.”
Michael Parenti in his book, “Inventing Reality,” indicts the media as handmaidens of capitalism with its all-pervasive Establishment view: socialism is evil, capitalism sacred. Most Americans consider America a great country, not the terrible, uncivilized nation I deem it.
Whatever verdict history renders about newspapers, the Internet will never turn conservative America into the progressive nation it should be.