The New York Times today provides one more stereotypical brush to its work-in-progress portrait of bloggers as drooling-the-mouth members of mob carrying computers instead of rope for a lynching or torches to set fire to the monster.
The bottom line is: Stereotypes are bred by LAZINESS. And the Times provides it in bulk form with an article with the original leading headline: “Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters.” (NOTE: After we posted this they CHANGED the headline to a more news-neutral one. Do they read The Moderate Voice??)
Is this a product of jealousy, because they were several beats behind the Eason Jordan story and the Jeff Gannon stories? Who knows. But the end result of this story is laying on stereotypes as thick as a housepainter lays on paint. If Casting Central needs to hire people to typecast they should call the New York Times ASAP. Just look at some key portions.
THE LEAD:
With the resignation Friday of a top news executive from CNN, bloggers have laid claim to a prominent media career for the second time in five months.
In September, conservative bloggers exposed flaws in a report by Dan Rather; he subsequently announced that on March 9 he would step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News.” On Friday, after nearly two weeks of intensifying pressure on the Internet, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, abruptly resigned after being besieged by the online community. Moreover, last week liberal bloggers forced a sketchily credentialed White House reporter to quit his post.
For some bloggers – people who publish the sites known as Web logs – it was a declaration that this was just the beginning. Edward Morrissey, a call center manager who lives near Minneapolis and has written extensively about the Jordan controversy, wrote on his blog, Captain’s Quarters (captainsquartersblog.com): “The moral of the story: the media can’t just cover up the truth and expect to get away with it – and journalists can’t just toss around allegations without substantiation and expect people to believe them anymore.
What do you see here?
- A broad-brush statement that this is just the beginning of bloggers on the warparth.
- A seemingly dismissive reference to Morrissey. You see, he is a “call center manager,” which is a statement of fact (we assume) but also is a way of saying: “He isn’t hired by a big corporation to do this full-time like we are. So there.” Well, yes, Morrissey didn’t have to jump through corporate hoops to be allowed to write. He didn’t have to be ordained by a superior to express his opinion and present his analysis to the world. He pressed a key on his computer and bypassed all that.
- Use of Morrissey’s comment high up about the media covering up the truth will turn off at least part of the readership that doesn’t like conservative bloggers and doesn’t believe the media intentionally covers up. People on the left certainly don’t feel the media is covering up. Yet others point to plain journalistic sloppiness and laziness. So while Morrissey’s opinion on that is as valid as any other, the PLACEMENT OF IT suggests all bloggers consider the media as engaged in a cover up. This stacks the deck on how readers who don’t agree with Morrissey view the story and how they subsequently view bloggers — who are being not-so-subtly defined by the Times in this piece as erratic, exciteable ideologues.
So the deck has already been stacked in this Times piece early on, painting bloggers AS A GROUP with stereotypical attitudes.
If there ever was a need for nuance, the Times piece is it.
THE BODY OF THE STORY: For instance, on his site Jeff Jarvis has noted that this quote of his was taken out of context:
But while the bloggers are feeling empowered, some in their ranks are openly questioning where they are headed. One was Jeff Jarvis, the head of the Internet arm of Advance Publications, who publishes a blog at buzzmachine.com. Mr. Jarvis said bloggers should keep their real target in mind. “I wish our goal were not taking off heads but digging up truth,” he cautioned.
Jarvis has never suggested that’s what bloggers are doing. He writes:”And, of course, that makes it look as if I’m wringing my hands over the morals of my fellow bloggers when, in fact, I’m worried about precisely what The Times is doing here: using this episode to call us a lynch mob.”
Read his MUST READ open letter to the New York Times (see link above).
And then there’s this quote:
“The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail,” he lamented online after Mr. Jordan’s resignation. He said that Mr. Jordan cared deeply about the reporters he had sent into battle and was “haunted by the fact that not all of them came back.”
Some on line were simply trying to make sense of what happened. “Have we entered an era where our lives can be destroyed by a pack of wolves hacking at their keyboards with no oversight, no editors, and no accountability?” asked a blogger named Mark Coffey, 36, who says he works as an analyst in Austin, Tex. “Or does it mean that we’ve entered a brave new world where the MSM has become irrelevant,” he asked, using blogger shorthand for mainstream media.
THE ENDING:There’s more but we always tell everyone always look at THE LAST PARAGRAPH of a news story and you can often see what message they want to leave you with.
So here’s how the Times ends its story:
Mr. Abovitz, who started it all, said he hoped bloggers could develop loftier goals than destroying people’s careers. “If you’re going to do this open-source journalism, it should have a higher purpose,” he said. “At times it did seem like an angry mob, and an angry mob using high technology, that’s not good.”
There you have it: bloggers really do what they do — for no pay, cutting out hours of downtime, hobby time — because they love to destroy careers. It isn’t a matter of accuracy or holding people accountable for their WORDS or demanding that they be who they say they are. And it isn’t as if the people who had to step down could have avoided it by owning up to some of the questions raised early on.
It’s all simple: bloggers love to tear someone apart.
What is this really about?
The fact is, some news media types — particularly editors who’ve come up through the journalistic farm system with all the dues paying and office politicking that it entails — seem highly resentful that they now have these pesky amateur know-it-alls running around and trying to do what they do after they worked and clawed so hard to get where they are and have the official status that they have.
There is an ineffable sense of contempt and arrogance to this Times piece and some others done on blogging.
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin in a New York Post piece recounts the Jordan affair and concludes:”The only unjustified and irrational attacks on display here are the ones against the bloggers who called on Eason Jordan to account for his words and actions. The MSM better get used to the sound of bloghounds baying. This revolution can’t be unplugged.”
REMINDER: Check out the Outside The Beltway Traffic Jam.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.