UPDATED

On the front page of Sunday’s print edition and home page of the online edition, the New York Times is clucking about an animation it puts in the category of “Maybe Journalism.” The widely seen video, from a Hong Kong media company, purports to show what transpired between Tiger Woods and his wife in the recent incident that has dominated our celebrity-addled news programming lately.

Here’s the top of the Times’ story, entitled “In Animated Videos, News and Guesswork Mix”:

Welcome to the new world of Maybe Journalism — a best guess at the news as it might well have been, rendered as a video game and built on a bed of pure surmise.

A computer-generated ‘news report’ of the Tiger Woods S.U.V. crash — complete with a robotic-looking simulation of Mr. Woods’s wife chasing him with a golf club — has become a top global online video of the moment, perhaps offering a glimpse at the future of journalism, tabloid division. (No matter that the police said she was using the club to release Mr. Woods from the car.)

The minute-and-a-half-long digitally animated piece was created by Next Media, a Hong Kong-based company with gossipy newspapers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The video is one of more than 20 the company releases a day, often depicting events that no journalist actually witnessed — and that may not have even occurred.

A glimpse at journalism’s future, tabloid division? How about journalism’s present, in a somewhat different form?

It looks more to me like the latter. Next Media is following in the footsteps of what American journalism has made a trademark, particularly in the book, magazine and tabloid-TV businesses. Modern books about politics and business, in particular, are loaded with direct quotes and minute details of events “no journalist actually witnessed.”

These techniques have a purpose. They’re designed at least as much to capture and hold the attention of print and video audiences as to enlighten them.

I acknowledge that this is a bit of a stretch. I’m emphatically not saying that fly-on-the-wall print accounts, which journalists claim are based on extensive interviews with principals, are close to the same thing as this maybe-it-happened video.

I am saying that when people ask you to trust their depictions of “events that no journalist actually witnessed — and that may not have even occurred,” you take them with a serious grain of salt.

Some of this stuff has been going on for decades. In 1965 Truman Capote called his masterwork — In Cold Blood, about the killing of a Kansas family and the killers’ path to their executions — a “nonfiction novel”. He helped create a new form of literature. He also helped spark the form of journalism that has become so standard now: the fly-on-the-wall pretense that pervades so much of what we see.

Critics later questioned Capote’s motives and methods, and ultimately the basic honesty of the book. But he was honest at least in the sense that he acknowledged that he was writing a novel, and more rigorous as a reporter than a lot of modern journalists even pretend to be. (Norman Mailer also called his brilliant book about a real crime, The Executioner’s Song, a novel.)

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward is the most famous current practitioner of the nonfiction novel, though he’d undoubtedly insist that his work is pure journalism. I don’t trust a thing he writes, and haven’t for some time.

Woodward’s books are loaded with direct quotations of people he says he interviewed, and some he didn’t. How can you have faith, beyond assuming that he’s telling the truth  when he says he has it right, that it is right? Why should you?

Now everybody, or seemingly everybody, follows the Woodward lead. Novelistic journalism is the order of our times. But I’m convinced it’s one the reasons people have concluded, rationally, that they can’t really believe anything anymore.

Newspapers, too, play the fly-on-the-wall game. Consider what the Times itself did today.

The “Maybe Journalism” piece runs at the bottom of the front page, while at the top is a long story about how President Obama, after long consultations with advisors, reached his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. The story is based, says the reporter, on “dozens of interviews with participants as well as a review of notes some of them took during Mr. Obama’s 10 meetings with his national security team. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, but their accounts have been matched against those of other participants wherever possible.”

We readers are still being asked to trust the word of people who violated the confidentiality of the White House Situation Room and other internal deliberations. I tend to believe the overall thrust of the story — that Obama and his team struggled mightily with this decision — but I don’t have any faith in most of the particulars, including the anonymously sourced direct quotes of the president and others in the deliberations.

Why is this not, in the words of the story about the Hong Kong animators, “depicting events that no journalist actually witnessed — and that may not have even occurred”?

This isn’t the first draft of history. It’s the first draft of someone’s nonfiction novel on the Obama presidency.

(Disclosure: I own a small number of shares in the New York Times Co. They’re worth a lot less than I paid for them. Updated to make clearer that I’m not equating in any apples-to-apples way the animations and the fly on wall journalism.)

So it’s official. Comcast has announced its intention to buy NBC Universal from GE. The danger of this cannot be overstated, but it could actually be the catalyst for a policy conversation the nation desperately needs to hold.

A Comcast-NBC combination is brazenly anti-competitve and anti-democratic. It would give one company far too much ownership over not just professionally produced media but also the ways media consumers can receive it.

Worse, if approved, it could mark the tipping point in Big Media’s push to take control over the Internet itself. That’s where we need to focus our attention.

We can come out of this the right way if the announced deal prompts Congress to stop ducking the key media consolidation issue of our time. If we can use data networks the way we choose, the traditional fears about media consolidation — the concentration of mass media in the hands of a few immensely powerful corporations — lessen over time. They’re still worth worrying about, but not as much.

No, the issue now is the truly scary media consolidation we face: the “broadband” duopoly’s increasing control over what we can do with our media. The cable and phone giants are determined to decide what bits get delivered in what order, at what speed and at what time — if they get delivered at all — to the people who want them.

It’s been obvious for years that a day like this was coming. From We the Media in 2004 (and I was hardly the first person to notice):

In a world where we may end up with one, two, or at most three broadband telecommunications providers in any given community, the end-to-end principle is in serious jeopardy. Should giant telecommunications companies—namely cable and local phone providers—have vertical control over everything from the data transport to the content itself? For example, as I was writing this book, Comcast, the cable monopoly in my area, was trying to buy Disney. The attempt failed. If this happened, Comcast could have decided to deliver Disney’s content online more quickly than someone else’s, discriminating on the basis of financial considerations. Such a regime would have been a disaster for the unimpeded flow of information. We should insist on a more horizontal system, in which the owner of the pipe is obliged to provide interconnections to competing ser­vices. Unfortunately, today’s regulatory and political power bro­kers lean in the wrong direction.

…

The cable and phone companies have shown again and again that they abuse their power. They are historical monopo­lies with control over vast territories given to them by govern­ments. But they used to be regulated monopolies. Increasingly, they are freeing themselves of regulation.

…

The threat is still more theoretical than real, at least in the United States. People in China, where the govern­ment censors Internet content, know firsthand the danger of centralized choke points.

So now it’s real. What can we do?

First, recognize how networked media work, or should. In the traditional mass media days, people who worked for big businesses created media and distributed it; they manufactured stuff and put it in trucks, or broadcast it over one-way, one-to-many distributions systems.

In an Inter-networked world we create stuff, and then we make it available, and other people come and get it. People at the edges of networks make the decisions that matter, not the people who provide the data pipes. That’s how it should work, at any rate.

Second, this suggests we shouldn’t obsess over what sound like huge issues but are actually peripheral. Specifically, I don’t care that much if Big Content ends up in just a few hands, as long as the rest of us can a) keep creating our own media and b) make it available on distributed networks without having to pay unjust toll charges.

Comcast has already started pushing its Internet users toward an entirely artificial pricing, putting usage caps on packet-switched data services, i.e. the Internet, for heavy users of data-rich applications, notably video. This has been a conflict of interest from the start, given that Comcast is primarily a video-delivery company for Big Content. Comcast’s data pipes could be used to provide much greater Internet bandwidth, but Comcast chooses to limit that kind of data, and not just for technical reasons.

Now that it would own one of the major Big Content companies, the conflicts of interest would expand in dramatic and obvious ways on the video side. I’m sure the other Big Content players can fend for themselves when it comes to keeping their cable channels; they have lots of financial and lobbying clout.

But the rest of us, especially the younger people who should be entering a data-networked world of nearly unlimited media choices, have less power. And we’re likely to be the ones, in the end, who lose the most.

Why? Because it will be in Comcast’s financial interest to clamp down as much as possible on Internet data use when it conflicts with its cable-TV business, which is to say on a constant basis.

Keep in mind that Comcast wouldn’t be the first company to have this kind of vertical content and distribution structure. Time Warner owns some cable franchises along with CNN and other media properties; Cablevision has its own content business. Phone companies have some projects under way, too.

The greater threat is where this deal would lead. It would set off a rush of other buyouts, moving more Big Content under the wings of the rest of the telecom companies. They’ll have the same incentives to restrict data usage, and unless they’re told not to do this by people who can make it stick, that’s exactly what they’ll do.

Understand this: The telecom companies are trying to remake the Internet into a form of cable television. It’s not because they’re evil, though they often behave in evil ways, but because it would be good business — for them, and the hell with the rest of us.

So where does Congress come into the picture? Everywhere, obviously, but I wish I had confidence in lawmakers’ willingness to address this.

Keep in mind how people are elected today: for the most part, despite progress in Internet organizing and fundraising, via television advertising. Will Congress take on companies that control the biggest media? Have the lawmakers ever done this, at least in recent times? Nope.

Please be clear on what’s at stake: We are heading toward a level of media control that, if the telecom companies succeed in achieving it, will threaten every bit of the work I and many others have been doing for the past decade.

I’ll say it again: This is the media-consolidation issue of the early 21st Century. If you care, call and/or write your member of Congress, before it’s too late.

John Byrne, former editor of BusinessWeek, who’s starting a new venture:

I passionately believe that the future of media is digital and that newcomers have tremendous advantages over incumbents. Most of traditional media remains in a complete meltdown, dragged down by high costs, old ways of thinking, and legacy work processes. As tough as the past three years have been for traditional media, the next three are going to be nothing less than brutal: more closures, greater losses, increasing layoffs of highly talented journalists and editors.

That’s also why we’re going to see a media boom in the next three years, the launch of tens of thousands of new media entrepreneurs on the Internet. Many of them will fail, but many more will flourish and replace the brands our fathers and grandfathers grew up with. The success of Huffington Post, Politico, Drudge, GigaOm, TechCrunch, and other media enterprises on the web have shown us a path forward. But it’s still very early days and the new followers are going to have lots of advantages over the first movers. I’m thrilled and excited to be part of this revolution.

He gets it.