If you think that all reporters and columnists now have an accurate idea of what blogs are all about — then you need to think again after reading the latest column by L.A. Times media critic David Shaw, as Slate’s Jack Shafer points out.
If you boil this whole debate down (explained below) and strip away all the side issues you remain with this: bloggers are bypassing the gatekeepers and corporate voice-givers and doing it all themselves. Many in the print media in particular truly resent this because with the touch of a FINISH button on Powerblogs (we hope more and more) or whatever a citizen can now do what journalists have had to JUMP THROUGH HOOPS for years to do.
And that is the bottom line: it’s underlying resentment. And, interestingly, perhaps because blogging (so far) is largely an offshoot of print media you see the resentment more in newspapers and magazines than you see it in the broadcast media, which truly seems fascinated with blogging and the speed with which print information moves. Perhaps because broadcast media already moves information in real time, versus clunkier newspapers and magazines which do have online sites but their prime products are more widely circulated on paper way after the fact.
This latest battle in this ongoing war can be seen in Shaw’s weekend L.A. Times piece in which he looks at a judge’s decision on bloggers and shield laws and says, in part:
Are bloggers entitled to the same constitutional protection as traditional print and broadcast journalists?
Given the explosive growth of the blogosphere, some judge is bound to rule on the question one day soon, and when he does, I hope he says the nation’s estimated 8 million bloggers are not entitled to the same constitutional protection as traditional journalists — essentially newspaper, magazine, radio and television reporters and editors.
This statement will surely bring me an avalanche of angry e-mail from bloggers and their acolytes, cyber citizens convinced that I’m just a self-serving apologist for the soon-to-be-obsolete media that pay my salary.
It isn’t easy to define what a journalist is — or isn’t. Forty or 50 years ago, some might have dismissed I.F. Stone as the print equivalent of a blogger, writing and publishing his independent, muckraking “I.F. Stone Weekly.” But Stone was an experienced journalist, and his Weekly did not traffic in gossip or rumor. He was so highly regarded by his peers that he was widely known as “the conscience of investigative journalism.”
BLOGGERS require no journalistic experience. All they need is computer access and the desire to blog. There are other, even important differences between bloggers and mainstream journalists, perhaps the most significant being that bloggers pride themselves on being part of an unmediated medium, giving their readers unfiltered information. And therein lies the problem.
When I or virtually any other mainstream journalist writes something, it goes through several filters before the reader sees it. At least four experienced Times editors will have examined this column, for example. They will have checked it for accuracy, fairness, grammar, taste and libel, among other things.
If I’m careless — if I am guilty of what the courts call a “reckless disregard for the truth” — The Times could be sued for libel … and could lose a lot of money.
ETC.
But…wait a minute:
–When he says experienced journalist he’s means a journalist who worked their way through the journalistic system: likely going to journalism school, starting on smaller publications, doing the police beat, etc. How dare bloggers by pass this de facto certification and farm system and get right down to writing?
–Not all journalists work on newspaper staffs. Many journalist use fine stringers (who in some cases have pooled resources and worked in bureaus) who are paid by the piece. Other papers simply use occasionally freelance pieces.
A bit more:
Shield laws (and the 1st Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press, the philosophical progenitor of these laws) were created to enable the media as an institution to inform the citizenry, without government interference.
And it’s the institutional safeguards of the traditional media that differentiate them from bloggers and the blogosphere, even if those safeguards sometimes fail. When they do, as they clearly did in the case of several recent media scandals, heads roll.
Many bloggers — not all, perhaps not even most — don’t seem to worry much about being accurate. Or fair. They just want to get their opinions — and their “scoops” — out there as fast as they pop into their brains. One of the great advantages of the Internet, many Web lovers have told me, is that it’s easy to correct an error there. You can do it instantly, as soon as the error is called to your attention, instead of having to wait until the next day’s paper.
But the knowledge that you can correct errors quickly, combined with the absence of editors or filters, encourages laziness, carelessness and inaccuracy, and I don’t think the reporter’s privilege to maintain confidential sources should be granted to such practitioners of what is at best pseudo-journalism.
Shaw has a point on the usefulness of editors or filters. But he then makes the leap that bloggers are perhaps more lazy, careless or inaccurate than reporters who get a salary. Perhaps he’s referring to highly ideological bloggers who are intent on boosting their side and using whatever they can against the other — not using all facts (facts that would help the other side and hurt their side).
But “pseudo-journalism?” 20th Century thinking. Strip it all away and there seems underlying resentment: how can bloggers get their readership without having to do what we had to do to be ALLOWED to write on certain topics and be ALLOWED to have a tool to communicate? WE had to jump through more hoops than a dog act at a circus; they just wrote, pressed a button and got read.
Shafer’s response, which takes Shaw apart, should be read in full, but here’s a chunk 4 U:
Shaw seems to believe that the First Amendment and its subsidiary protections belong to the credentialed employees of the established corporate press and not to the great unwashed. I suggest that he—or one of the four experienced editors who touched his copy—research the history of the First Amendment. They’ll learn that the Founders wrote it precisely to protect Tom, Dick, and Matt and the wide-eyed pamphleteers and the partisan press of the time. The professional press, which Shaw believes so essential in protecting society, didn’t even exist until the late 19th century.If blogs err, Shaw has my permission to shame them. If they libel him, he has my blessing to sue. I suspect that the more he treats blogs like the press the more he will come to realize that they are the press, and that the petty attempt he’s made with his column to commandeer the First Amendment for the corporate media will only wreak the damage to society and the press that he so fears.
Yes…can we be VERY BLUNT? Shaw’s column is Cover Your Ass for the established media as it looks over its shoulder to see a rapidly growing upstart, a populist form of information and opinion delivery — one that still relies on the mainstream media for the bulk of its information and raw material for comment…but one that doesn’t require a journalism degree, corporate dues paying, skills in office politics, or permission from a corporation for widespread dissemination.
Just a computer. Energy. Ideas. Dedication. And Drive.
Most of the latter are required in traditional journalism…except with the computer many people can deliver information without having to every worry about the degrees or hoops anymore…
BUT THERE ARE MANY OTHER VOICES, SOME WITH OTHER IDEAS:
—Jay Rosen:
Shaw didn’t check far enough into that the increasingly empty term “blogger” to find the more relevant category for his column’s purposes, which is the stand alone journalist, as Chris Nolan puts it. Are bloggers journalists? the question Shaw wants to ask, is a tired one for all involved. What’s the difference between a stand alone and a corporate journalist? is the relevant question, but Shaw didn’t learn enough about his subject to ask it….
Shaw’s stingy and insular view–we’re the ones the founders were talking about when they said press, so back off amateurs–is actually part of the “death spiral” Meyer referred to. It was always a newsroom delusion that “journalists are the only profession mentioned in the First Amendment. But now it’s more deadly, for as Jeff Jarvis puts it, “The barrier to entry to media is demolished. Media, always a one-way pipe, now becomes an open pool.” The First Amendment is not about the pipe; it’s about the pool.
—Michelle Malkin:”I have only one point to add–namely, that the neat division between “bloggers” on the one hand and “journalists” on the other is not as cut and dried as Shaw seems to think. As Radley Balko has noted, most of the top bloggers have one foot firmly planted in traditional print or broadcast media..”
—LA Observed:”His position that bloggers should not be covered by shield laws that protect reporters from disclosing confidential sources is defensible (though I disagree with it), but his arguments read like he did no research and wasn’t aware that scores of journalists blog these days or that many bloggers report and break stories. His broad-brush swipe, that no bloggers should be treated as journalists because some make stuff up, opened him up to easy ridicule about Jayson Blair et. al.”
—Stirling Newberry:
Shafer’s piece takes on the naked fear of people who are paid to write opinions have of peopel who are not paid to write opinions. This is an example of the analog/digital dynamic. The analog world protected soft property by making it hard to copy, by placing large capital barriers in the way of entry. The digital world breaks down the barrier to entry, without necessarily providing the values that the soft property had. In journalism the capital intensiveness is gathering news – one must truck the protons in real people around the world and get them to observe, interview and write. This capital intensiveness protected the soft virtue of getting the story right….Shafer documents what happens when the mental chinese wall needed to keep this game going meltsdown.
People that work for newspapers assume
* That they are journalists
* No one who does not work for a newspaper can be a journalist
Neither assumption is true all the time.
—Dean Esmay:”Jack Shafer gets it right.Thanks for understanding and respecting the first amendment, Jack. Unlike some people.”
—Stupid Evil Bastard:
Much as television didn’t kill off movies or radio despite the dire predictions of the time, I don’t believe that blogging is going to kill off traditional journalism either; no matter how popular some of the bloggers become. If anything, the best bloggers will probably make the jump to more traditional forms of journalism (and vice-versa) if they’re as good as some would have you believe. Indeed, some have already made this transition.
I suppose all of this is just my long-winded way of saying that you’re an idiot if you don’t carefully consider your sources of information regardless of whether it happens to be a blogger, a newspaper, or a news broadcast. Allowing yourself to simply accept whatever is said because a person has been credentialed and hired by big media is a dangerous mindset to hold because most big media, including the news organizations, are businesses first and foremost. At the same time, some of the greatest thinkers in history never finished college.
—Greg Prince:”It begs the question, the degree to which professional journalist antipathy toward the blogosphere is a function of the professional equivalent of penis envy. These nasty little bloggers get potentially thousands if not millions of readers and they never had to pay their journalistic dues. Heck, it’s not even their day job.”
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.